The Sentinella Family in Australia

My Personal History
Born in Brisbane, I lived in the suburb of Graceville until I was 5 years old. My birth name was David Hetper but later changed my name to David Sentinella (see below). Our family moved temporarily to Mareeba on the Atherton Tableland and then, after about six months, settled in Tolga, about 30 km from Mareeba. My family then consisted of my sister, Halina, 8 years older than me, my brother, George, 4 years older than me, my mother Mieczysława (Mimi) nee Woźnica and my father Jurek (Jerzy) (George).

We were, as the established Australians of the time put it, New Australians. My parents, together with their new-born daughter Halina (my sister) had emigrated to Australia from Poland via Germany after World War II. My father had been liberated from the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp and my mother, who spent her middle and late teens in Nazi occupied Kraków', had been liberated by the Russians.

Later my parents separated, and my brother and I lived with our father - my sister had moved to Brisbane to attend university.

We, my father, my brother and myself moved to Cairns and I attended North Cairns State School and later Cairns High School. My brother joined the Air Force at age 16 and went to Victoria. My father formed a new relationship and we moved to Buderim on the Sunshine Coast and there I attended Maroochydore High School.

Name Change
I moved to Sydney during my later high school years and lived with my mother and stepfather, Charles Sentinella, and shortly after I adopted the surname Sentinella. The four of us, my mother, my stepfather, my half brother, Michael, 12 years younger than me, and I lived in a harbour-side unit in Elizabeth Bay.

I attended Vaucluse Boys High School and then later I attended boarding school in Tasmania.

Study, First Jobs and Motorbikes
After high school I worked in electronics related jobs while studying electronics at night. My first flat was a tiny and mouldy storeroom that someone had the audacity to call a dwelling and make money out of. I bought a second hand 70cc step-through motorbike and then later a 90cc proper clutched bike, then a 125cc Honda.

My first job was with a tiny electronics firm, Electronics Specialists, that sold, serviced and rented televisions and had a an electronic security business as well. I am actually quite indebted to the owner, Robert Proctor, who taught me many practical and theoretical skills. This little company successfully won many tenders for security systems in schools and hospitals and even put in a closed circuit television system at Reserve Bank of Australia. We manufactured many of the assemblies in the tiny workshop in Bondi. It was also the beginning of colour television in Australia and we made chroma-lock adaptors to view colour television before colour was officially switched on. My mind was consumed by transistor circuits and TTL logic.

I only stopped working at Electronics Specialists because of personal issues in Robert's family. I looked around for another job and found a place in a manufacturing company called Delairco Bartrol, and their factory was in Sussex street in the city. Delairco Bartrol primarily made type-setting equipment for the print industry, especially newspapers and, quite remarkably were designing and making innovative equipment for the then recently opened mainland Chinese market. They also made lithographic exposure equipment. On the floors below the top floor where I worked, large motors were being made and serviced. The parent company, Delairco, made massive variable-speed drives for water and sewerage pumping. On the ground floor they had 30 ton Whitney metal punching machine. All this meant that steel trucks were making deliveries to the Sussex street dock and other trucks were taking fabricated steel to and from platers and painters. Sydney was very different during the mid-seventies.

Around this time, I bought a 250cc Honda twin "Dream" - my favourite bike and sick of the tiny flat, I moved to a larger, two-room flat in Paddington.

1975 was turbulent, and there were large-scale sackings in many industries and I was one of them. I was still studying at night and again looked around for another job - and this time I found work in the radio workshop of Legion Cabs. The boss was Basil, a white Russian, who arrived in Australia via Harbin. Basil was highly skilled and the four or five of us handled all the work for an entire cab fleet, a hire car fleet, the Kingsford Smith Airport bus service, a dozen radio base stations, and the recording and console equipment in the dispatch rooms.

As time moved on, I moved into a share house in Annandale and then later in the great share house in Stanmore. I lived in that stately Stanmore house for 13 years and shared with some 50 people, many of whom have remained life-long friends.

For a time, I also owned a 450cc Honda twin but also owned old bomb Ford Cortina.

In 1976, I studied Applied Biology at RCAE (now CSU) and then, in the following, transferred to NSWIT (now UTS) where I continued my applied science studies as Biomedical Science, in the following year I transferred to Electrical Engineering at UTS part time and worked at Medical Applications Pty Ltd - a joint venture company of Philips and Siemens.

The company had successfully tendered for a large part of the diagnostic imaging equipment at Westmead Hospital and I helped install the two massive angiographic suites there. I got myself involved in almost everything that was going - cardio cine cameras, cut film changers, fluoroscopy, automatic injectors, ECG, EEG, audiology - if it was electronic, I was interested. During this time I worked with a team designing and building a microprocessor-based ECG (EKG) unit. This was truly exciting - a 6809 based system - cutting edge.

Political Manoeuvring and Interesting Jobs
During the early 80's, Australia was in a state of economic upheaval, I was laid off at Medical Applications but quickly found work at a small computer company called "System One Pty Ltd". This little company did then what we would now consider impossible - they made computers and wrote the entire software to go with it. They initially used the Intel 8080-based computers from the UK in a case the size of a small bar fridge, to which up to 4, and theoretically up to 16, "dumb" terminals were attached. Later, in conjunction with another small electronics company, General Electronic Developments (GED), they switched to the software compatible Zilog Z80 processor and housed the whole thing either in the terminal itself or a smaller than before, external box. These systems ran on one or two 8 inch diameter floppy disks containing all the programs and all the data. Each disk held 1.2 megabytes. Later we added the first hard disk system - a massive 10 megabytes - 8 inch form factor - of course! All the software was written in assembler - it had to be - to fit into the tiny space - these systems were remarkably efficient. There were full accounting packages with customised software for a number of industries.

Towards the end of this project, I had a run-in with the Canadian managing director and resigned.

For a short time, I helped build a bookshop-cafe in Glebe and later helped renovate a house, also in Glebe.

Back to Medical Applications

Medical Applications was expanding again and I spotted their advertisement in the paper, went to the interview, and was re-hired.

In 1982, I went to Germany to study Computer Tomography (CT) and Digital Subtraction Angiography (DSA). In the following years, I installed and maintained various diagnostic imaging machines and had follow up courses in high speed medical cine, image quality courses (densitometry and sensitometry), and other devices.

On my return, I worked in many hospitals and private practices, mainly commissioning CT scanners and DSA suites.

The house in Stanmore was becoming a burden, and I moved into a house in Ashfield and had an arrangement to renovate it in exchange for rent. I re-wired it, re-plumbed it, installed a new bathroom, removed a wall, and installed a new kitchen.

Life with Helen and the Birth of my Son
It was during my visits to private practices that I met, Helen, the mother of my children. We moved in together in a house in Croydon and soon after my son, Alex, was born.

I became interested in the computer systems involved in the business of running a service organisation and wrote a multi-user software package in a database management language called FoxPro and created an interface with the mainframe system used by the company.

Philips in Holland knew that their computer systems were in need of re-organisation and had heard that I had written the service management software for Medical Applications and asked me to attend courses in the software that they were considering to use as the aptly titled "Common System" and report back as to its suitability. I studied the now obscure but interesting "Pick Operating System" in Eindhoven. Helen and I and our 9 month-old son lived in a company-supplied house for the time we were there.

Soon after our return from Holland we bought a small house in Newport on Sydney's Northern Beaches.

My involvement in Information Technology (IT) grew steadily and I proposed a Local Area Network (LAN) for the company. The proposal was accepted, and the network was installed. Our first network server was installed, and for its time it was big: 13GB in a RAID 5 array. Our first email system soon followed with on-demand dial-up links to our interstate LANs. The company used a mainframe for its commercial operation, so I developed an interface with the mainframe to keep the data up-to-date.

I also engaged in a little freelance work, and took on the database for (Australian Mineral Economics) AME - working with a good friend. I was also approached to form a company that would use X-rays or some other non-invasive technique to examine the internal condition of power poles, trees and structural components in buildings, bridges and other structures. We formed a company called Timb-A-Test and that later became Integrated Imaging Pty Ltd.

Move to Head Office
Philips, the majority partner in the joint venture, decided to go down the SAP (the famous German mainframe ERP company) path and I was moved to the head office in Blue Street , North Sydney. I was engaged in writing data extraction programs in the mainframe PC connected environment. This was the era Microsoft NT (3.5 and then later 4.0) and we started using MS SQL Server in conjunction with MS Development Studio.

Our team of some 20 people dealt with every division of Philips in Australia and it was clear that Philips was considering massive divestment. Division by division was carved up and their data isolated in readiness for divestment.

[Please visit again soon - as I will add to this as time allows]

see also http://hetper.id.au/david