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.
Node:Moof, Next:Moore's Law, Previous:monty, Up:= M
=