The electromagnetic unit of capacitance in the historic centimeter-gram-second (CGS) system. One abfarad equals one billion standard SI farads, making it an impractically large unit for real-world electronics. It was defined as the capacitance of a capacitor that stores one abcoulomb of charge across a potential difference of one abvolt. Engineers abandoned it in favor of the standard farad and its micro- or pico- subdivisions.
Heard on the job
We found an old textbook calculating transmission line capacitance in abfarads, but you have to convert everything to microfarads to make sense of it.