vanilla adj. [from the default flavor of ice cream in the U.S.] Ordinary flavor,

vanilla adj.

[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.