I've had on my desk for the last few months a Sun Ultra 20M2 workstation. Over the next few days I'll be reviewing/commenting on the box and my experiences with it.

Historically from a Unix vendor like Sun, the workstation was the desktop equivalent of the big server (or servers) you had in the server room. Workstations were typically of two types - the low-end workstation (a comparatively recent invention) provided support for the same CPU as used in the datacenter, but in a format that was useful for developers. The high-end workstation is more usually targeted to solving the high-end computing requirements for, say, 3D graphics.