monstrosity
= M =
Moof
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. 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.
--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.