Welcome back to Ctrl-Alt-Random, the tech corner where we dust off the relics of innovation and give them a good, hard look. This week, we’re diving into the digital graveyard to exhume three gadgets that, frankly, deserved a better fate. …

Every billion-dollar tech brand started somewhere — but some of those “somewheres” came with names that would never survive today’s focus group. Google was once Backrub — named after the algorithm’s “backlink analysis” function. It crawled the web’s link structure …