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Blue Cards
A blue card is a reference summary printed on a piece of colored card stock. It folds up like a road map and fits in your pocket. The original blue card may actually have been blue, but knowing the perversity of programmers in general, it was probably bright orange.
Blue cards aren't always cards anymore. One of the best is a full sheet of very stiff shiny plastic, sold by Micro Logic Corporation of Hackensack, New Jersey. The one sold with Microsoft's MASM is actually published by Intel and has grown to a pocket-sized booklet stapled on the spine.
Blue cards contain very terse summaries of what an instruction does, which operands are legal, which flags it affects, and how many machine cycles it takes to execute. This information, while helpful in the extreme, is often so tersely put that newcomers might not quite fathom which edge of the card is up. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.141.4.122 (talk) 13:45, 7 July 2009 (UTC)