The specification has been changed so that what you want should start
up as follows;
$ minicom -l [DEVICE]
From man minicom:
-l,
--ansi Literal
translation of characters with the high bit set. With this flag
on, minicom will try to
translate the IBM line characters to ASCII. Many
PC-unix clones will display character cor-
rectly without translation (Linux in a special mode,
Coherent and SCO).
I have tried -l, -l ansi, -l --ansi, --ansi and none of them
work. I always get VT102. The only way to get ansi is to go into
the menu for terminal settings, to select ansi. What would
possess whoever created minicom to not make it a setting that
could be set? I guess he worked for DEC and assumed everyone
worked on DEC gear. Well, I used to do a lot more on Data General
than DEC.