On the subject of drill string length the unit of measurement was used when I was working in the patch was tenths of a foot the tally tapes were 100 ft long.every joint of drill stem had to be measured or tallied and marked to the nearest tenth of a foot.
I once worked at a place building wire-line logging trucks everyone was given a 12 ft stainless steel Lufkin pocket that was marked off in tenths of an inch with smaller graduations that amounted to .02" The owner of the company would buy them gross lots o f 144 at a time then randomly stretch out 10 at a time and check them against each other. before issuing them because all of the blue prints were in .000" of an inch to us. I liked them but a lot of the guys couldn't get their head around to that method of measuring. but they were the same guys who would call 9/16" of an in inch 9 of those little marks, or 1 mark past the middle mark on a fractional tape measure