monty

monty

  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}.


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