Back in the old days, there were only six grades for baseball cards: mint (MT), excellent (EX), very good (VG), good (G), fair (F), and poor (P). Eventually people wanted a way to describe grades in between those, so EX-MT, VG-EX, G-VG, F-G, and P-F came to be. These 11 grades did a pretty good job of describing the vast majority of cards that were sold and traded, and they were all you ever saw when I first got into the hobby in the late 70s and early 80s.
When card prices rose precipitously in the 1980s and 90s, people started becoming a lot more interested in cards at the high end of the grading spectrum, and paying much more of a premium for them. The 10-point grading system used today by PSA is based on the one that Alan Hager described in his 1993 book "Hager's Comprehensive Price Guide to Rare Baseball Cards", with repeated notices that it was copyrighted. (I'm not certain, but I think PSA might have bought the rights to that system from Hager, a sleazy guy who ended up getting in all kinds of legal trouble.) Hager actually described his 6 grade as "EXCELLENT to NEAR MINT" (with 7 being NEAR-MINT and the other grades up to 10 GEM MINT being the same as today), but a lot of people were used to the old "EX-MT" designation, and so continued to use it for PSA 6. I guess PSA uses that old term too, which is kind of funny, but it kind of makes sense because it's more concise.
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