monty

/montee/ , 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 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. See the World Wide
Words article The Full Monty for discussion of the rather complex etymology
that may lie behind this phrase. Compare American moby.

