  The Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite was launched on 30 December
1995. It has made substantial contributions pertaining to compact objects and
their environs. Broad-band spectral and short-time-scale temporal studies are
exploring the effects of General Relativity in the regime of strong gravity. We
present a brief outline of the principal contributions and then give a general
overview of two new areas of x-ray astronomy that have proven by RXTE to be
very fruitful: accreting neutron stars with millisecond spin periods and
microquasars. The former pertains to the spin evolution of low-mass x-ray
binaries and the equations of state of neutron stars while the latter is lends
insight to disk-jet interactions in galactic black-hole binary systems.
