In light of all the criticism BlackBerry patent-infringement accuser NTP has been getting lately, it's interesting to get some perspective on the inventor who started NTP- the late Thomas Campana, Sr.

In yesterday's Chicago Tribune piece entitled "Blurry on BlackBerry", writer Mike Hughlett devotes significant space to some of Campana's accomplishments.

One section of the piece describes a situation in the late 1980s when AT&T was looking to develop a paging service to help beef up a new product it was preparing to introduce.

Murali Narayanan, who was with what was then AT&T Bell Laboratories, realized the internal developmental expertise was available. So he called ESA, a Chicago-based electronics engineering firm owned by Campana that had done some work for a Florida-based paging company named Telefind.

Although AT&T did not go with Campana's solution, Narayanan remembers him as "very responsive" to what AT&T was looking for.

"Tom was a pure entrepreneur," Narayan told the Chicago Tribune. "He was very enthusiastic, like a kid at heart..."