Prior to the advent of the microprocessor, a computer was usually built in a card-cage case or mainframe with components connected by a backplane consisting of a set of slots themselves connected with wires ; in very old designs the wires were discrete connections between card connector pins, but printed circuit boards soon became the standard practice.

Prior to the advent of effective antiretroviral therapy, as many as 5 % of people with AIDS eventually developed PML.

Prior to the advent of DNA sequencing, all cladistic analysis used morphological data.

Prior to the advent of modern dams in China, the Yellow River was extremely prone to flooding.

Prior to the advent of the charismatic Rubini, every well-schooled opera singer had avoided using a conspicuous and continuous vibrato because, according to Scott, it varied the pitch of the note being sung to an unacceptable degree and it was considered to be an artificial contrivance arising from inadequate breath control.

Prior to the advent of the railroad in the second half of the nineteenth century, the town's location on the river made for a thriving community ; it is reputed to have been the largest town between Chicago and Terre Haute at the height of its success.

Prior to the advent of the Dutch, the region was at the heart of the Mahican tribe.

Prior to the advent of tests to detect Clostridium difficile toxins, the diagnosis was most often made by colonoscopy or sigmoidoscopy.

Prior to the advent of leaded gasolines, poppet-valve engines typically required grinding of the valves and valve seats after 20, 000 to 30, 000 miles ( 32, 000 to 48, 000 km ) of service.

Prior to the advent of stand-alone DSP chips discussed below, most DSP applications were implemented using bit-slice processors.

Prior to the advent of Comus, Carnival celebrations in New Orleans were mostly confined to the Roman Catholic Creole community, and parades were irregular and often very informally organized.

Prior to the advent of Mac OS X, the Mac OS system regarded the content of a file ( the data fork ) to be a text file when its resource fork indicated that the type of the file was " TEXT ".

Prior to the advent of factory farming with its use of " zero-grazing " feeding techniques, pasture was the primary source of food for grazing animals such as cattle and horses.

Prior to the advent of the first SOCs, there was no semblance of consensus on psychiatric, psychological, medical, and surgical requirements or procedures.

Prior to the advent by North Electric of the proprietary ' LOCOTROL ' name, the product was referred to as ' RCE ' ( Radio Controlled Equipment ) or ' RCS ' ( Radio Control System ) and the lead and remote units as ' master ' and ' slave '.

Prior to the advent of the grain elevator, grain was usually handled in bags rather than in bulk ( large quantities of loose grain ).

Prior to the advent of the LPFM discussion and eventual rulemaking at the FCC, Low Power FM operations were found legally under FCC Part 15. 239 in the form of single transmitters and radiating cable operations.

Prior to the advent of home theater systems, when VCRs were used, the enhanced sound option was stereo high-fidelity sound or Dolby Pro Logic for Dolby Surround-encoded tapes.

Prior to the advent of the portable ' mill, small-scale sawmills were generally cobbled-together affairs constructed and operated by ( almost always ) two men with a penchant for tinkering.

Prior to the advent of GNSS, Celestial Navigation was also used by trained navigators on military bombers and transport aircraft in the event of all electronic navigational aids being turned off in time of war.

Prior to the advent of the web, such support had to be done either via an online service or a private Bulletin board system run by the company and accessed over a direct phone line.

Prior to the advent of computer technology, the accused were sometimes made to hold a placard with their name, date of birth, booking ID, weight and other relevant information on it.

Prior to the advent of the American School, the scope of Comparative Literature in the West was typically limited to the literatures of Western Europe and Anglo-America, predominantly literature in English, German and French literature, with occasional forays into Italian literature ( primarily for Dante ) and Spanish literature ( primarily for Cervantes ).

Prior to the advent of Chinese civilization and world religions in the region generally known today as East Asia including the territorial boundaries of modern-day China ; tribal totemistic and animistic religious practices were the way in which prayers, sacrifices or offerings were communicated to the spiritual world by groups or mediatory individuals such as shamans.

Prior to the release of Windows Media Player in Windows 98 Second Edition, separate programs, CD Player, Deluxe CD Player, DVD Player and Media Player, were included in old versions of Microsoft Windows for playback of media files.

Prior to Windows 2000, Windows NT ( and thus PE ) supported the MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC ISAs.

Prior to the release of Windows Mobile 2003, third-party software was developed using Microsoft's eMbedded Visual Tools, eMbedded Visual Basic ( eVB ) and eMbedded Visual C ( eVC ).

Prior to Visual C ++ 2005, the Platform SDK was the only way for programmers to develop 64-bit Windows applications.

Prior to SPSS 16. 0, different versions of SPSS were available for Windows, Mac OS X and Unix.

Prior to the release of Windows 2000, PWS was available as a free download as well as included on the Windows distribution CDs.

Prior versions are still available for earlier OSes back to Microsoft Windows 95.

Prior to that, Microsoft Windows used a tiling window manager.

Prior to Windows Vista, the Desktop Toolbars could be dragged off the taskbar and float independently, or docked to a display edge.

Prior to the acquisition of the product by Freescale Semiconductor, versions existed for Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube, Nintendo DS, Wii, Palm OS, Symbian OS, and even for BeOS.

Prior to Windows Vista ( and Windows Server 2008 ) this registration is performed by the DHCP Client service.

Prior to Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 3, the most common problem encountered with Microsoft's DNS server was cache pollution.

Prior to Microsoft's release of a security patch, the workaround for this issue was to turn off 16-bit application support, which prevented older programs ( those written for DOS and Windows 3. 1 ) from running.

Prior to Windows Vista, System Restore was based on a file-based filter that watched changes for a certain set of file extensions, and then copied files before they were overwritten.

Prior to versions 1. 0. 2. 0 and 1. 0. 2. 1 for the Windows release, many Windows Vista users had experienced compatibility and connection issues while using Hamachi.

Prior to the release of Apple DOS 3. 1, Apple users had to rely on audio cassette tapes for data storage and retrieval, but that method was notoriously slow, inconvenient and unreliable.

Prior to DOS extenders, if a user installed additional memory and wished to use it under DOS, they would first have to install and configure drivers to support either expanded memory specification ( EMS ) or extended memory specification ( XMS ).

Prior to AGS 2. 7, a DOS engine was also available ; this has since been discontinued.