The "chief Yahoo" is tapped to return to the board after an absence of 18 years, along with Charles Schwab and former Walmart CEO H. Lee Scott Jr. Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News.

Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion — but how did a company that started so small come to be worth so much? That’s a story that began in the early days of the World Wide Web, when ...