Zdenek Kopal has kindly invited me, and I have accepted, to “instruct the theoreticians on known facts”. He also asked me to express my opinion on the relative evolutionary stages of components.

I am essentially an observing astronomer, occupied with stars in our immediate neighborhood, say within 10 or at most some 25 parsec, i.e., the lower main sequence and the white dwarf degenerate branch.

I hope that I may perhaps contribute by surveying and reporting some relevant data. I shall touch on a number of topics, limited because of selection and lack of knowledge. My contributions to binary stars lie in the realm of parallaxes, mass-ratios and masses, – and for the past half century, perturbations, interpreted as unseen companions, stellar and otherwise. I shall briefly report on some results, and I shall be wondering and hoping that some trace of stellar evolution may possibly be present in these results. After having witnessed for more than half a century my own astronomical evolution, the time has come for me to become more aware of theoretical, evolutionary and cosmological aspects of the cosmic material, I have been playing with so long.