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 the late modern era, the abbot was treated with the utmost reverence by the brethren of his house.

Before the Norman conquest in 1066, justice was administered primarily by what is today known as the county courts ( the modern " counties " were referred to as " Shires " in pre-Norman times ), presided by the diocesan bishop and the sheriff, exercising both ecclesiastical and civil jurisdiction.

This act is commonly criticized by modern cartoonists including Watterson and Pearls Before Swines Stephan Pastis.

Before reaching Italy however, Titus learnt that Galba had been murdered and replaced by Otho, the governor of Lusitania ( modern Portugal ).

Before the modern age and the worldwide spread of knowledge, written examples of new mathematical developments have come to light only in a few locales.

Before modern strobe lights, lenses were used to concentrate the light from a continuous source.

Before the outbreak of the Korean War, Joseph Stalin equipped the KPA with modern medium tanks, trucks, artillery, and small arms.

Before modern computing, researchers requiring random numbers would either generate them through various means ( dice, cards, roulette wheels, etc.

Before the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, political parties were more akin to parliamentary factions, and were fluid, informal and disorganised by modern standards.

Before the Second World War, researchers in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, independently and in great secrecy, developed technologies that led to the modern version of radar.

Before the modern era, the Bhikkhuni Sangha spread to most Buddhist countries including Burma ( also known as Myanmar ), with the notable exceptions being Tibet and Thailand.

Before World War II, many European architects moved to the United States, where modern architecture continued to develop.

* Before 1630 BC – 1500 BC — Landscape ( Spring fresco ), wall painting with areas of modern reconstruction from Akrotiri, Thera, Cyclades, is made.

Bleeding: Before modern surgical developments, there was a very real threat that a patient would bleed to death before treatment, or during the operation.

Before modern factory butter making, cream was usually collected from several milkings and was therefore several days old and somewhat fermented by the time it was made into butter.

Before the Paillon River was covered over, the Pont-Neuf was the only practicable way between the old town and the modern one.

Before the development of modern refrigeration, ice cream was a luxury reserved for special occasions.

: Before this strange disease of modern life.

Before modern disaster management, when floods occurred, some of the population might initially die from drowning but then many more would suffer from the ensuing famine and spread of diseases.

Before early modern nation-building, the Low Countries referred to a wide area of northern Europe as a low-lying triangular river delta for the rivers Rhine, Meuse, Scheldt, and Ems.

The Kung Bushmen were described as ' The Harmless People ' in a popular work by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas in 1958, while Lawrence Keeley's 1996 War Before Civilization suggested that regular warfare without modern technology was conducted by most groups throughout human history, including most Native American tribes.