I have some old schematics from the 1970s for colour TVs published by Phillips.
The earliest was drawn then printed for a TV released in 1974 so it would be at least drawn 12 months earlier.
That has p, n & µ for capacitors and k & M for resistors… no “R” is used.
BTW there are also a few four way junctions 
Your average person in the street here doesn’t know about CGS or even MKS. Metric and that’s it. Imperial is what some oldies still think in.
It’s more to do with length being used far more often in daily life. The most common units are km, for travel distances, e.g. biking, driving; m for lengths around the garden, in the built-up environment; cm for things in the house; mm for smaller things. There is a great deal of overlap; my bathroom tiles are 300x300 mm rather than 30x30 cm, maybe because the tile shop also has 15x15 mm mosaic tiles rather than 1.5x1.5 cm mosaic tiles.
For volume there is less need for lots of decade multiples, less so than in the past. Milk and petrol are purchased in litres; wine, beer and soft drinks in ml, l for larger bottles. Now and then you see a wine glass with a 15 cl mark, but people would rather say 150 ml of wine is one standard drink. For really large volumes writers resort to measures like an Olympic swimming pool (OSP). 
Area is another one. Unlike volume, it’s often calcalated from lengths so units other than m^2 or cm^2 are rarely used. There is also of course the hectare, a non-SI unit.
Weights (mass?) are pretty standard: either grams, kilos or tonnes… SOME * people even know that 500gm = I/2 a kilo.
)But the tree in my new avatar has a span of just over 2 chains!
Deciliter (dl) is a really common unit for cooking and baking here in Sweden!
It’s like everything in american recipies is measured in the unit ‘cup’.
Every kitchen has a small, usually stainless steel, ‘dl’ measure, that is used for measuring whatever you need for the cooking, unless it is salt and spices, then there are teaspoon and ‘kryddmått’ which translates to ‘spice measure’ or similar…
Sometimes its marketing. Homes are still in square feet in Malysia, which has been metric for a very long time.
!000 sq ft sounds much bigger than 100 sq m
Here in the US, food recipes drive me crazy. It would be so much easier in metric.
In the British media the two accepted measurement units are “Seven or eight football pitches” and “Half the size of Wales” which, on reflection, are probably easier to grasp than “500 square miles” or “2 hectares”.
But you are right - in the building trade everything is mm (or metres) but never cm.
Now, it’s nearly going home time. Anyone fancy a pint?
Recipes in metric are a pain if your measurement cups and spoons are in cups teaspoons and tablespoons. But an electronic kitchen scale is great. I use grams. Once you make the imperial volume measurement you can weigh it and measure grams in the future. By using tare function, you also reduce the amount of stuff needing to be washed later.
Yes I can audiolise (? audio equivalent of visualise) in my mind my relatives saying sq ft in Chinese. It might partly be because a lot of pre-metric title deeds are in sq ft.
Of course there are the informal units in some European countries cognate to “pound” which are 500g. NL and DE come to mind.
My comment was about retail shopping in my area.
If the shop assistant is asked for 500gm of something, everything is OK and I will receive the amount asked for.
If I ask for 1/2 a Kilo, I am usually greeted with a look of stunned, uncomprehending amazement.
Mind you, I also get that stunned, uncomprehending look when I try to explain the sign over the express lane in the supermarket is just plain bad English and needs correcting.
I wouldn’t know. It’s been a long time since I asked for a particular weight of something. Many things come packaged in the supermarket (so much the worse for plastic pollution), loose produce you grab what you want and get it weighed or weigh it yourself, same in open markets. Maybe in smallgoods, which I haven’t bought for a while, and ½ kg of ham is just too much.
Maybe the look you are getting re bad English means I’m only a poor peon who works here and follows orders, why not take it up with management?
Edit: If you mean the 10 items or less should be 10 items or fewer, you may enjoy this cartoon:
1 cL = 0.338 fluid ounces
1 dL = 3.38 fluid ounces
It’s just a decimal point, nothing more, nothing less.
You can use either one, depending on the size of what it is that you’re measuring
No, it has nothing to do with the CGS system. However, I’ve never used the CGS system, so I could be wrong.
Buy a 400 mL glass beaker, a 100 mL glass beaker, a 500 mL glass beaker, and a 5 mL glass pipette. Or just cross out the metric measurements on the recipe and write the equivalent in cups and teaspoons. I did both. One tablespoon equals 3 teaspoons, as you probably know already.
ohms works for me. I used a capitol omega once when making labels in Libre Office Writer for the labels to put on my resistor boxes. But I don’t care if I can do that in Kicad or not. 2.2 k-ohms is fine with me.
Please note that while k means 1000, K usually means 1024 (2^10). You probably already knew this, but I just wanted to make it explicit that K might not equal k, depending on the context in which it is used.
Putting on my pedatic hat, the current IEC abbreviation for 1024 would be Ki
I was thinking more indirectly. While many lay people might not be familiar with CGS or MKS, I think there may be some trickle down from the scientific/engineering community, perhaps causing laws to be written on the subject. If an American went to a local supermarket and encountered product weight in stones, someone would get stoned. (whatever that means.) Anyway this is just a weak theory.
My electronic kitchen scale can give weight in pounds and ounces. But even as an American steeped in the English system, I find these units to be a pain to work with compared to grams. If I need to know pounds and ounces I will convert to that as a last step.
But to be pedantic (??!!) grams are a unit of mass while the scale is measuring force.
When I first moved to South Korea in the early 2000s, house area was measured in a local unit called pyeong, an old system based on “standard” woven floor mats (similar to the Japanese tatami mats). Coming from the US at the time, we measured floor area in square feet. Just when I because comfortable understanding pyeong, as something I could relate to like sq. ft., they criminalized the use of pyeong in 2007 and everyone uses square meters now. That’s a good thing, but I have no “feel” when I see a room sized in sq m. When it comes to floor areas, I’m stuck in the old ages with square feet or pyeong.
Now, if only we could get the IC packaging industry to go metric, I could do PCB designs in one unit of measure instead of two.
Unfortunately process inertia is against that happening soon.
So far as I know, USA was first out of the gate with IC packages. The DIP packages all had 0.1 inch lead pitch. Then SOICs had 0.05 inch lead pitch. I guess Philips, Siemens, and Hitachi had other ideas and we were all “off to the races”. See the bit of industry humor about having 13 standards…
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