Introduced in late October 1996, the first entry in the family featured single or dual Pentium Pro processors.

Later entries featured Pentium IIs and IIIs; the XP1000 was the only non-x86 based entry, featuring a DEC Alpha processor.

Compaq aimed the Professional Workstation at computer-aided design users, software programmers, multimedia designers and financial workers.

While workers of those fields primarily ran Unix-based operating systems on workstations at the time, the Compaq Professional Workstation came preinstalled with Windows NT 4.0 Workstation (later Windows 2000 Professional).

This microcomputer- or microprocessor-related article is a stub.