Perkin-Elmer

SAMBA, at the time, was using the legacy Concurrent Computer Systems Perkin-Elmer 3220 Mainframe Computer Systems that was unique to the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region. Senior Management was mostly Pakistani who were seconded from Citibank in Pakistan. The Mafia was a tough one to break through and stay safe from for most of us non Pakistani's. We still survived.

The Data Center in the eastern region was managed by an Indonesian guy called Dharjanto (Yanto) Effendi supported by a Pakistani, Khalid Mukthar. Other staff included Salim Ghauri from Pakistan, Herbert Peters from India (Kerala), Saleem (Librarian) from India and a Tanzanian chap, Abdullah Awadh. Communications and Networking were supported by two Filipino technicians, Abelardo Atienza and Tony Magallanes, supervised by a Pakistani, Tahir Khalil. An indian born Brit Engineer, Danny Singh, from Perkin-Elmer, UK, was also present for all branch network installations and data  center maintenance. His role was later taken over by a local systems engineer, Fawaz Faghira, who later went on to work for banking operations.

The team worked round the clock to ensure the database was installed and tested and the system was stable every single day. Software, that was developed by Citibank MENA IT Center in Athens, was supported by a team of Greeks from Athens. Later on, in 1984, SAMBA created its own IT Development and Support Center in Riyadh, where many of the Greek guys from Athens joined to form the local support team. I moved to Riyadh in July 1985.

Application software was written in Assembler and PE-COBOL and ran on a PE-OS32 platform. While PE-BASIC was never used on the Production systems. Three data centers were, initially, implemented for the three regions. Later on, they were all merged into a single database located in Riyadh, serving all the end users in Kingdom and across the globe.