Linus Torvalds of the past "unprofessional and uncalled for" and announced a period of "time off" to "get some assistance on how to understand people’s emotions and respond appropriately". It soon transpired that these events followed "The New Yorker" approaching Linus with a series of questions critical of his conduct. Following the release of Linux 4.19 on October 22, Linus went back to maintaining the kernel. Initially, Torvalds wanted to call the kernel he developed "Freax" (a combination of "free", "freak", and the letter X to indicate that it is a Unix-like system), but his friend Ari Lemmke, who administered the FTP
EPOC (operating system) system to drive their next generation of devices. First, however, they needed to engineer a 16-bit single-board computer—something that was extremely difficult at the time. They codenamed the project "SIBO", for "single-board organiser" or "sixteen-bit organiser". To develop the SIBO hardware and software, they needed samples of the 16-bit microprocessors they would be programming; but it took more than a year to secure the chips, which caused a significant delay. By 1987, development of EPOC was underway: It was a single-user, preemptive multitasking operating system designed to run in read-only memory (ROM). The operating system and its programmes were written