monty

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}.
    

monty

   <programming, abuse> /mon'tee/ Any program with a ludicrously
   complex user interface that performs a trivial task.  An
   example would be a menu-driven, button clicking, pulldown,
   pop-up windows program for listing directories.  The original
   monty was a 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 it actually
   *did* was {FTP} files off the network.

   [{Jargon File}]

   (2005-04-05)