*Chipmaker Broadcom celebrates 20 years, a few of them racy

They are Internet godfathers: Henry Samueli and Henry Nicholas, co-founders of the OC-based chipmaker, helped lead the broadband revolution, which led to the Internet revolution. What started as a two-person operation is now made up of almost 10,000 people worldwide - and the company's revenue grows by another billion dollars every few years. From the OC Register:

Broadcom is on track to ship more than two billion chips for the first time in 2011 and the company's chips are found inside everything from Nintendo's popular gaming consoles to Apple's famous handhelds. Samueli moves across the panels pointing out the revenue figures. It hit more than $1 billion in 2000, drops with the dot-com bust, and then grows and grows and grows. In billions of dollars - 1.6, 2.4, 2.7, 3.7 and 4.7. "We covered every major segment of this broadband communications world," he says.

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The two Henrys started working in Nicholas' Redondo Beach home and funded the company with two $5,000 checks. Henry Nicholas was the business guy, and Henry Samueli was the tech guy. They both came out of the defense industry, and their idea was to take some of the technologies they developed for military communications systems, put them into chips and get the price point down to the mass market level.

Of course, Broadcom remains linked to the alleged shenanigans of Nicholas, who resigned as CEO in 2003. That was followed by criminal investigations into his swinging lifestyle and various reports of drug use and prostitutes. Then came his indictment in connection with the illegal backdating of stock options.* All those charges, however, were later dropped.

*Update: Just to clarify, Nicholas was indicted, along with Samueli and Broadcom executives Nancy Tullos and William Ruehle. All charges were dropped.