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"
(http://clever.net/quinion/words/articles/monty.htm) for discussion of
the rather complex etymology that may lie behind this. Compare
American moby.
![[prev]](../gif/left.gif){kind=small}
![[up]](../gif/up.gif){kind=small}
![[next]](../gif/right.gif){kind=small}