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 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 WWII British ' social anthropology ' and American ' cultural anthropology ' were still distinct traditions.

Before the arrival of the British, Rajputs, Jats, the Kathats, Cheetas and Rawat Rajputs were land-holders, as well as cultivators.

As his ship was readied for battle, Nelson held a final dinner with Vanguard < nowiki >'</ nowiki > s officers, announcing as he rose: " Before this time tomorrow I shall have gained a peerage or Westminster Abbey ," in reference to the rewards of victory or the traditional burial place of British military heroes.

Before the Dutch retook control of the islands, the British removed many nutmeg trees and transplanted them to Ceylon and other British colonies.

Before the speech, US delegations met with Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, and French President Charles de Gaulle to brief them on the US intelligence and their proposed response.

Before Farmer's efforts, tracing one's genealogy was seen as an attempt by colonists to secure a measure of social standing within the British Empire, an aim that was counter to the new republic's egalitarian, future-oriented ethos.

Before going sober, Chapman jokingly referred to himself as the British actress Betty Marsden, possibly because of Marsden's oft-quoted desire to die with a glass of gin in her hand.

Before 1997, it was the duty of the British Forces Overseas Hong Kong.

Before railway construction on the Continent demanded huge quantities of maleable iron mainly for rails, for which low quality iron sufficed, Wallonia was the only Continental region to follow the British model successfully.

Before the Industrial Revolution in the mid-to-late 19th century, demand for oriental goods remained the driving force behind European imperialism, and ( with the important exception of British East India Company rule in India ) the European stake in Asia remained confined largely to trading stations and strategic outposts necessary to protect trade.

Before age 13 she had broken into the top 100 players in the world and the British Chess Magazine declared, " Judit Polgár's recent results make the performances of Fischer and Kasparov at a similar age pale by comparison.

Before the Congress opened on 13 June, negotiations between Andrássy and the British Foreign Secretary Marquess of Salisbury had already " ended on 6 June by Britain agreeing to all the Austrian proposals relative to Bosnia-Herzegovina about to come before the congress while Austria would support British demands.

In Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776, Jon Butler of Yale University argues against a Europeanized or predominantly British identity of colonial America, and underlines contributions by Igbo, Ashanti, Yoruba, Catawba, and Lenape.

Philby found that the award proved helpful in obtaining access to fascist circles: " Before then ," he later wrote, " there had been a lot of criticism of British journalists from Franco officers who seemed to think that the British in general must be a lot of Communists because so many were fighting with the International Brigades.

Before he can sell the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, he is discovered by the British and is killed by members of MI5 who stage his death as a heart attack.

Before the departure of British colonial rule and the subsequent independence of Pakistan, the population of the city included Hindus and Sikhs, but the community is still present numbering around 250, 000 residents.

Before the recovery of the Mary Rose, Count M. Mildmay Stayner, Recorder of the British Long Bow Society, estimated the bows of the Medieval period drew, maximum, and Mr. W. F.

Before going into film-making, Anderson was a prominent film critic writing for the influential Sequence magazine ( 1947 – 52 ), which he co-founded with Gavin Lambert and Karel Reisz ; later writing for the British Film Institute's journal Sight and Sound and the left-wing political weekly the New Statesman.

Before the sale was announced, Anthony Bamford, chairman of British excavators manufacturer JCB, had expressed interest in purchasing Jaguar Cars in August, the year previously ; only to back out when told the sale would also involve Land Rover, which he did not wish to buy.

Before the American company could begin their operations, however, the island was occupied by an Australian company under British license.

Before the independence of the country and till 1985, international communications were managed by Cable and Wireless, a private British company.

Before, Anguilla ( 1631 – 1650 ), the present-day British Virgin Islands ( 1612 – 1672 ), St. Croix and Tobago had also been Dutch.