Picas and points and agates, oh my!

My day job has some unique legacy issues. Back in the olden days, when there was a good chance of chopping of fingers, going blind or mad from the tools we used, before the advent of these cool things called computers and desktop publishing, my profession had our own forms of measurement. You might be familiar with some of these, Picas, points and agates. It's just like the metric system, only worse.

Things changed when computers came in. Picas (and by extension Points and Agates) actually changed size to make it 6 picas in an inch (and 12 points to a pica means 72 points in an inch). The old standard roughly translated to 72.4 points in an inch.

Now some places, newspapers mostly, use even more esoteric measurement systems based on columns (think the width of a column of text). When you buy advertising in newspapers you still buy it by column inches. So if you have a 2 column by 3 inches ad, do you know what a column is? Well, no. Each newspaper's columns are different sizes (depending on paper size, column tabulature, gutter, margins, etc). And a 2 column ad is not twice a 1 column ad because you have to account for the gutter (between columns). Sound like fun so far.

Now, when computers replaced people automated the workforce, most markets and designers made the switch to decimal inches (some still use fractions, but fractions are just division). Not newspapers. WTF is up with them?

Hello, lets get with the 90s, guys. Really, designing in picas is out. It died in 1988 with the advent of laser printing. Stop beating the dead horse already.