It's not a VAX that you're physically plugging a terminal into. The remote machine is totally capable of communicating with a newer terminal, it just needs to know how. You're being nice by giving it that information. You can also just install it locally in your home directory (~/.terminfo). (You used to be able to stuff the entire entry into the TERMCAP environment variable and not install anything.)
Every terminfo is custom, to the terminal it applies to. It's just that most entries are 20+ years old and even glacial distros have converged on some version of the database that mostly worked, until the recent resurgence of interest in actually writing new terminal software.
During Covid, the local corner shop in London managed to source some amazing Bulgarian white flour. It must have been high protein, and made the best bread. Once supply chains went back to normal, they went back to British and Canadian flours, and my bread has never been as nice.
I think HP sold their calculator business to this company. I bought the iOS version of the 15C emulator directly from HP many years ago, but the app store changed it to this company.
There were backwards-compatible protocols proposed, such as EIP, but the committee chose a backwards-incompatible protocol for v6. Their assumption was that v4 would run out of space in a single-digit number of years and everyone would be forced to migrate. The past 30 years have shown that not to be the case.
They went with SIPP, which was one of the backwards-compatible options. It should be kind of obvious from the vast number of backwards compatibility methods available in v6 that v6 is actually backwards compatible... but for some reason a lot of people either refuse to believe this or have double standards around what counts as compatibility.
It looks like almost the same colour of those David Clark headsets which seem to be ubiquitous in airplane cockpits or helicopters. It's even the background of their corporate logo.
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