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EPOC is a family of operating systems developed by Psion for portable devices, primarily PDAs. EPOC came from epoch, the beginning of an era, but was backfitted by the engineers to "Electronic Piece Of Cheese"

EPOC16, originally simply named EPOC, is the operating system developed by Psion in the late 1980s and early 1990s for Psion's "SIBO" (SIxteen Bit Organisers) devices. All EPOC16 devices feature an 8086-family processor and a 16-bit architecture. EPOC16 is a single-user pre-emptive multitasking operating system, written in Intel 8086 assembler language and C and designed to be delivered in ROM. SIBO devices include the: MC200, MC400, Series 3, Series 3a, Series 3c, Series 3mx, Siena, Workabout and Workabout mx.

The EPOC32 operating system, at the time simply referred to as EPOC, was later renamed Symbian OS. Adding to the confusion with names, before the change to Symbian, EPOC16 was often referred to as SIBO to distinguish it from the "new" EPOC. Despite the similarity of the names, EPOC32 and EPOC16 were completely different operating systems, EPOC32 being written in C++ from a new codebase with development beginning during the mid 1990s.

EPOC32 is a pre-emptive multitasking, single user operating system with memory protection, which encourages the application developer to separate their program into an engine and an interface. The Psion line of PDAs come with a graphical user interface called EIKON which is specifically tailored for handheld machines with a keyboard (thus looking perhaps more similar to desktop GUIs than palmtop GUIs). However, one of EPOC's characteristics is the ease with which new GUIs can be developed based on a core set of GUI classes, a feature which has been widely explored from Ericsson R380 and onwards.

EPOC32 was originally developed for the ARM family of processors, including the ARM7, ARM9, StrongARM and Intel's XScale, but can be compiled towards target devices using several other processor types. 

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