A SPARCstation is a workstation computer that Sun Microsystems built a while back. There were many models, of which the 5 was the third most powerful, behind the 10 and the 20. They ran Sun's version of Unix, which was the BSD-based SunOS when it initially came out, but became SVR4-based Solaris soon after. You can also run Linux, OpenBSD, and NetBSD on them now. The SPARCstations are a couple of processor revisions behind now. They ran SuperSPARCs, which were supplanted by UltraSPARCs, then UltraSPARC 2s, and, recently, UltraSPARC 3s.

Many of us were weaned on Sun workstations in college (although I wasn't -- we had DECstations), and there's a certain amount of cache in certain cirles in owning one in, and there's also a good bit of nostalgia, as well.

The SS5 is probably about as powerful as a fast Pentium or slow Pentium II, although that's really comparing apples and oranges; the SPARC family is RISC-based, so there's a lot of give and take in what's faster. But it was a well-made computer, with good specs for the time. It came with SCSI and ethernet, and could hold up to two 2.1GB drives internally, in addition to its CDROM and floppy drives (not all came with all of those, obviously). Oh, and all of that fit in a box about 3 inches tall by 16 inches wide by 16 inches deep (SPARCstations were often referred to as ``pizza boxes'').

In my line of work (Solaris administrator), it's also nice to have one to play around with at home, to keep one's skills up or to have a ``spare'', so that you can experiment with things that might be questionable in a company environment.