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 heterodyning, radio signals often overrode and interfered with each other.

Before helping to create science fiction, Gernsback was an entrepreneur in the electronics industry, importing radio parts from Europe to the United States and helping to popularize amateur " wireless.

Before Christmas 1955, Brantley had the group record a demo of " Please, Please, Please " for a local Macon radio station.

Before the efforts of Freed and others, black music was taboo on many white-owned radio outlets, but artists and producers quickly recognized the potential of rock and roll.

Before cable-ready TV sets became common in the late 1980s, an electronic tuning device called a cable converter box was needed to receive the additional analog cable TV channels and transpose or convert the selected channel to analog radio frequency ( RF ) for viewing on a regular TV set on a single channel, usually VHF channel 3 or 4.

Before the onset of World War II, CBS recruited Edmund A. Chester from his position as Bureau Chief for Latin America at Associated Press to serve as Director of Latin American Relations and Director of Short Wave Broadcasts for the CBS radio network ( 1940 ).

Before appearing in television, Rayburn was a very successful actor and radio performer.

Before Miller's disappearance, his music was used by World War II AFN radio broadcasting for entertainment and morale as well as counter-propaganda to denounce fascist oppression in Europe with even Miller once stating on radio:

Before digital electronics became the norm such a component was used to allow radio and television receivers and other equipment to be switched on at minimum volume with an audible click, then the volume increased, by turning a knob.

Before stereo radio was introduced, the most common speaker location was in the middle of the dashboard pointing through perforations towards the front windshield.

Before television, radio was the dominant home entertainment medium.

Before Jansky observed the Milky Way in the 1930s, physicists speculated that radio waves could be observed from astronomical sources.

Before the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he destroyed all records of his existence then moved to Turkey, where he worked for Turkish radio and set up an intelligence organisation.

Before and during World War II, Lucy had made several notable and successful guest appearances on several radio programs ; among them Jack Haley's radio show and bandleader Kay Kaiser's radio program.

The lead single from the album " Before You " became a huge radio hit in Canada and she performed the single on the 2000 Juno Awards, where she won two awards for Best Adult / Pop Album and Best Female Artist.

Before the Joint Army / Navy ( JAN ) phonetic alphabet, each branch of the armed forces used its own radio alphabet, leading to difficulties in interbranch communication.

Before the advent of valve ( vacuum tube ) technology, early radio enthusiasts used noisy spark-gap transmitters, such as the first spark-gap modulation technology pioneered by the first real audio ( rather than telegraph code ) radio broadcaster, Charles D. Herrold, in San Jose, California, or the infamous Ruhmkorff coil used by almost all early experimenters.

Before the days of solid-state ( electronics ), inexperienced young men were sequentially directed through a series of supply compartments to request a Fallopian tube for a malfunctioning radio, RADAR, or SONAR set.

Before his role as host of that program, Daly was a VJ on MTV's TRL, and a DJ for the Southern California based radio station KROQ-FM.

Before his death, Ballantine delivers a videotape to an academic friend, but when viewed on an ordinary videotape machine the only result is radio static.