[from the default flavor of ice cream in the U.S.] Ordinary {flavor},
standard. When used of food, very often does not mean that the food
is flavored with vanilla extract! For example, vanilla wonton soup
means ordinary wonton soup, as opposed to hot-and-sour wonton soup.
Applied to hardware and software, as in "Vanilla Version 7 Unix can't
run on a vanilla 11/34." Also used to orthogonalize chip
nomenclature; for instance, a 74V00 means what TI calls a 7400, as
distinct from a 74LS00, etc. This word differs from {canonical} in
that the latter means `default', whereas vanilla simply means
`ordinary'. For example, when hackers go on a {great-wall},
hot-and-sour soup is the {canonical} soup to get (because that is
what most of them usually order) even though it isn't the vanilla
(wonton) soup.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {canonical}{flavor}{zapped}]