Back in 1994 or 1995, a department at my university was giving away some decommissioned terminals. I figured I'd pick one up so that two people could use my PC

Back in 1994 or 1995, a department at my university was giving away some decommissioned terminals. I figured I'd pick one up so that two people could use my PC (running Linux) at the same time. There were two models available. One model's units all looked cleaner than those of the other, so I picked up one of those. I bought a cable (RS-232?) and plugged it in. It worked great for command line stuff, but pine (the email client) and pico looked off, with some parts of the screen being drawn over others. I knew nothing about termcap/terminfo. This was before Google (and even before Altavista). I spent hours trying different things (perhaps I got some pointers from helpful folks on a newsgroup?) and managed to improve the situation, but it never worked flawlessly. Looking back, what I was doing was a lot of random stuff without much understanding. I will probably never know whether what I was trying to do was impossible, or whether I failed just because I didn't know what I was doing and had no systematic approach to editing the termcap file.