My professor for Compilers 101 in grad school tasked us with working on an Ada subset compiler. I work best alone, but he insisted on making me work on a team. My experience with "teams" in college was a couple of us doing the work, and others claiming, "We worked on the organizational aspects and wrote some tests, so we didn't have much time for meetings or coding." Anyway, punster that I am, I told the prof that our team was the "NOOPs" (we spelled it differently back then).

So my group's project was writing the VM in C, and only two of us contributed as predicted. Our VM passed the prof's test suite (actually written by our adversary, "Team Lambda", IIRC). So I have a "It all started with a NOOP" story too.

This prof really was a genius himself and an expert in his field. He introduced many of us to the wisdom of Knuth. Our professor once recounted a story about having written an earnest letter to Knuth asking, "I know you are busy, but do you have time to do a lecture on compilers for my class?" He received back in the mail the original letter and envelope, enclosed in another with the "I know you are busy" underlined. My puns are kind of dumb, so I'm not sure he ever understood what I meant. He did ask us what our individual contributions were, and proof there of. My teammate followed me to State U.'s security headquarters begging for some of my test cases.

Have a nice day everyone!