Jan-Erik Söderholm said:
And the "u" is *MUCH* better then the "m" for "micro", IMHO...
Why do you believe this, since the Greek letter 'mu' is symbolized in
our alphabet by the letter 'm', hence what you see sort of looking
like a 'u' with a decending leading edge, is really an 'm'. Let's cut
to the basics:
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html
Note that the SI symbology for 'micro' is represented by the Greek
letter "mu", represented in our alphabet as 'm'. See:
http://www.ibiblio.org/koine/greek/lessons/alphabet.html
More than any other book that I could lay my hands on, "The ARRL
Handbook" over the years avoided the symbology issue almost entirely,
by simply labeling mfd value capacitors with a decimal value, say
0.01, and mmf value capacitors with an integer value such as 56. This
works for me. In the older issues (I checked the 1961 issue),
sometimes you'd see an occasional 'mf' or the Greek character 'mu',
but not a 'u' or a 'p' designation in the entire book. The same
pattern held true in the 1990 issue.
In my copy of Horowitz and Hill's "The Art of Electronics" (my copy is
the 4th printing dated 1998), the same pattern is followed as in the
ARRL publications, with one notable exception. The double Greek letter
symbology for 'micro-micro farad' has been replaced by pf. If you ask
me, this is not a significant or particularly productive change,
except for easing the job of typesetters!
Harry C.
p.s., Management organizations and Europeans both delight in promoting
unnecessary changes to existing systems that already work rather well,
if for no other reason than to simply call attention to something --
What that something is I'm still trying to determine!