Before the advent of printing, breviaries were written by hand and were often richly decorated with initials and miniature illustrations telling stories in the lives of Christ or the saints, or stories from the Bible.

Before the advent of rock and roll, concept albums had their original heyday in jazz of the early to mid ' 50s with artists such as Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra, the latter of whom would record numerous concept albums for Capitol throughout the last half of the ' 50s such as In the Wee Small Hours, Come Fly with Me, Where Are You?

Before the advent of fast computing machines, solving a dynamical system required sophisticated mathematical techniques and could be accomplished only for a small class of dynamical systems.

Before the advent of government-funded public schools, the primary mode of education for those of the lower classes was the charity school, pioneered during the 19th century by Protestant organizations and adapted for use by the Roman Catholic Church and governmental bodies.

Before the advent of computer filter synthesis tools, graphical tools such as Bode plots and Nyquist plots were extensively used as design tools.

Before the advent of machine tools, metal was worked manually using the basic hand tools of hammers, files, scrapers, saws and chisels.

Before the advent of modern computers numerical methods often depended on hand interpolation in large printed tables.

Before the advent of copyright, anonymous and pseudonymous publication was a common practice in the sixteenth century publishing world, and a passage in the Arte of English Poesie ( 1589 ), the leading work of literary criticism of the Elizabethan period and an anonymously published work itself, mentions in passing that literary figures in the court who wrote " commendably well " circulated their poetry only among their friends, " as if it were a discredit for a gentleman to seem learned " ( Book 1, Chapter 8 ).

Before the advent of wax candles in the 14th century, this office was said in the dark or with minimal lighting ; and monks were expected to memorise everything.

Before the advent of direct-dialed long distance calls, a subscriber would need to contact the long-distance operator in order to place a toll call.

Before the advent of the pocket calculator, it was the most commonly used calculation tool in science and engineering.

Before the advent of the British, no empire based in mainland India had controlled any part of what now makes up the country's Northeast, part of the reason for the ongoing insurgency in Northeast India.

Before the advent of modern antibiotics, oil of thyme was used to medicate bandages.

Before the advent of the touchpad, small trackballs were common on portable computers, where there may be no desk space on which to run a mouse.

" Before the advent of Islam, the city was known as Yathrib but was personally renamed by Muhammad.

Before the advent of the CCD beam profiler, the beam width was estimated using the knife-edge technique: slice a laser beam with a razor and measure the power of the clipped beam as a function of the razor position.

Before the advent of DVD and Blu-ray, the Video CD ( abbreviated as VCD, and also known as View CD, Compact Disc digital video ) became the first format for distributing films on standard 120 mm optical discs.

Before the advent of artificial refrigeration, Madeira wine was particularly prized in areas where it was impractical to construct wine cellars ( as in parts of the southern United States ) because, unlike many other fine wines, it could survive being stored over hot summers without significant damage.

Before the advent of anesthesia, surgery was a traumatically painful procedure and surgeons were encouraged to be as swift as possible to minimize patient suffering.

Before the advent of VLSI devices, TTL integrated circuits were a standard method of construction for the processors of mini-computer and mainframe processors ; such as the DEC VAX and Data General Eclipse, and for equipment such as machine tool numerical controls, printers and video display terminals.

Before the advent of modern pipes, water was brought from an outdoor source such as wells, pumps or springs.

Before the advent of disk operating systems and the ability to record large data files, core dumps were paper printouts of the contents of memory, typically arranged in columns of octal or hexadecimal numbers ( a " hex dump "), sometimes accompanied by their interpretations as machine language instructions, text strings, or decimal or floating-point numbers ( cf.

Before the advent of the modern critical edition of historical Roman works, AUC was indiscriminately added to them by earlier editors, making it appear more widely used than it actually was.

Before the advent of the codex ( book ), Latin and Greek script was written on scrolls.

Before the advent of radio, carrier pigeons were frequently used on the battlefield as a means for a mobile force to communicate with a stationary headquarters.

Before burning the ship, he was able to salvage every last scrap of metal, such as hinges.

Before the development of silicon power rectifier diodes, cuprous oxide and later selenium was used ; its low efficiency gave it a much higher forward voltage drop ( typically 1. 4 to 1. 7 V per " cell ", with multiple cells stacked to increase the peak inverse voltage rating in high voltage rectifiers ), and required a large heat sink ( often an extension of the diode ’ s metal substrate ), much larger than a silicon diode of the same current ratings would require.

Before rubber was invented, the first versions of tires were simply bands of metal that fitted around wooden wheels to prevent wear and tear.

Before Thomsen, this might have been done by mechanically sorting the materials according to their materials or the level of craftsmanship they displayed, but as the proveniences of many of the materials were known, he could see that crude artifacts were sometimes found with fine ones and metal artifacts with artifacts of stone.

Before plastic pipes, it was the standard alternative to metal pipes, especially for sewer and outdoor drainage applications.

Allmusic wrote about Believer's Sanity Obscure album: " Before 1990, the Christian heavy metal genre rarely strayed from generic riffing and poor lyrics.

In 2005 the Industrial / Nu metal band, Industrial Frost, used the words of a Dobson poem called " Before Sedan " as the lyrics of a song of the same name.

Before creating Summoning, Protector was playing drums in a thrash / death metal band called Marlignom and had embarked on a four year study of drums in music school.

Before this layer sets, terrazzo workers partially embed metal divider strips in the concrete wherever there is to be a joint or change of color in the terrazzo.

Before the development of the electric toaster, sliced bread was toasted by placing it in a metal frame or a long-handled fork and holding it near a fire or kitchen grill.

Before 1853, when US silver coins were reduced in weight 7 %, coins had exactly their value in metal ( from 1830 to 1852 ).

Before the advent of modern welding technology, it was a primary tool of metal workers.

Before true-waterproof zippers were invented, other methods of keeping the suit waterproof at the entry point had to be devised, with the most common being a long rubber entry tunnel which would be flattened shut, then rolled together from the sides and finally folded and clamped with a metal clip.

Before rubber was invented, the first versions of tires were simply bands of metal that fitted around wooden wheels in order to prevent wear and tear.

Before their overhauls, the 1500 and 1600 series had a brushed aluminum livery with a thin red stripe, and usually called " Silverbird " cars from their natural metal finish.

Before the Model A, in order to make a paper lithographic master for a lithographic press like the Multigraph 1250, one had two choices: Type up a new master using wax-coated carbon paper on a special master sheet, or use a metal plate coated with a modified silver halide photographic emulsion.

Before the technique of injecting air into molten iron was discovered by Kelly and by Bessemer, iron was available as cast iron, a strong but brittle metal made in a blast furnace by treating iron ore with coke derived from coal, and wrought iron, a more malleable and flexible metal made by heating iron ore in a low oxygen environment in a bloomery heated by charcoal and producing " blooms ", which were 100 to 200 pound lumps of very low carbon iron mixed with slag.

Before the appearance of metal tools, dugouts were hollowed-out using controlled fires.

Before the availability of metal the oar was normally levered against 2 wooden pins called Thole pins inserted in the gunwhale.

Before their next full-length, Cave In began experimenting with their sound offering Creative Eclipses, a five-song EP which indicated a space rock direction the band would then pursue for several years, as opposed to their metal roots.

Before the Umeå hardcore phenomenon went into full bloom, the band was seen as part of the scene centered around youth-oriented venue Galaxen, along with the punk-rock scene as well as metal bands such as Meshuggah.

Before the advent of cheap metal wares in industrialized societies, and later plastic, wood played a much greater part as the raw material for common objects.