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}.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {Full Monty}]