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monty /mon'tee/ n.
1. [US Geological Survey] A
program with a ludicrously complex user interface written to
perform extremely trivial tasks. An example would be a
menu-driven, button clicking, pulldown, pop-up windows program for
listing directories. The original monty was an infamous
weather-reporting program, Monty the Amazing Weather Man, written
at the USGS. Monty had a widget-packed X-window interface with
over 200 buttons; and all monty actually did was FTP
files off the network. 2. [Great Britain; commonly capitalized as
`Monty' or as `the Full Monty'] 16 megabytes of memory, when
fitted to an IBM-PC or compatible. A standard PC-compatible using
the AT- or ISA-bus with a normal BIOS cannot access more than 16
megabytes of RAM. Generally used of a PC, Unix workstation,
etc. to mean `fully populated with' memory, disk-space or some
other desirable resource. This usage may be related to a TV
commercial for Del Monte fruit juice, in which one of the
characters insisted on "the full Del Monte"; but see the World
Wide Words article
"The Full Monty" for discussion of the rather complex etymology that
may lie behind this. Compare American moby.
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