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Comment by pluma | Hacker News Reader

I misread that as "to acquire Apple". Then I misread that again as "to acquire Apogee" (as in, the name 3D Realms went by from 1987 to 1996).

Now I'm wondering behind the reasoning of the Apigee brand. Was it an intentional play on Apogee Software of the 80s/90s? If so, why? Something about "playing with APIs" I presume, but that seems confusing.

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The word "apogee" literally means the highest point in the course of something. Apogee Software and Apigee both play off the english word meaning.

So there's that, and then the Apigee split out like Api-gee makes you think gee, that must have something to do with APIs.

Gee makes me think Ghee which makes me want Indian food. Indian food comes from India where we outsource software development and APIs are used in software development.

So it's a circular reference.

Gee!

Interesting. I wasn't aware it's an actual English word. I don't think I've ever seen it outside of the company name.

I keep seeing it as a really strange spelling of "a piggie" and then I think "there had to be a better name than that"

I thought I read apogee too. I remember their early 90s games like Rise of the triad and duke nukeem.

Apogee used to also be a compiler company, it's where the domain apogee.com has pointed as long as I can remember. They used to have a link to the shareware company iirc. Now it looks like they provide Java runtimes for embedded devices

Well considering Apigee is a public company with hundreds (thousands?) of large enterprise and has been around since the early 2000s... no?

It's a pretty decent name for an API gateway.

Unless you're a timelord, the 1980s/1990s pre-date the early 2000s, so they must/could have been aware of the pre-existing Apogee brand when they decided on the name.

But as someone else pointed out, apparently "apogee" is an actual word in the English language, so they may have been entirely unaware of Apogee Software (or considered the brand sufficiently unrelated/dead not to cause any confusion).

The reason I'm asking is that to someone who doesn't know "apogee" is an actual word the choice seems as awkward as founding a technology company called "Atori".

There is also Apogee Electronics the audio hardware company.

I also read it initially as "acquire Apple" and had to check the date...

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