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 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.