I haven't created much technology. But I decided to attempted creating a timeline of technology advancements, but don't know where to start. The last time I attempted to do something like this, it ended up with them still having stone weapons for hundreds of years! So how does one create a reasonable timeline of technology advancements without making them hit nuclear power before 1800?

(since it was technology, I put it in here, although it has quite a bit of history too. Feel free to move it.)

Well, technology takes different amounts of time to develop, often a long time. It also needs other technologies to be discovered to be built. For example, to learn how to smelt and refine metal, humans first had to learn how to control fire. To split the atom, they first needed to have technology to understand the atom. Then they had to have the technology and equipment to split the atom.

So would you have to start with stone axes, adobe huts...a.k.a no technology whatsoever, or start with the ability to control fire? If the ability to control fire a 'startup' technology, then probably metallurgy and bronze/iron tools would follow soon after.

With my world, the technology will progress like 50 years slower than Earth, and end in year 4390 or so. Is that feasible, to slow even simple technology like stone ovens by 50 years?

It's a good question whether use of tools or control of fire came first (and I don't know the answer off-hand, or if we even do know the answer...I would suspect tools, but *shrug*), but I think it's fair to say that they together make the prerequisites for pretty much all other technology.

It occurs to me that perhaps you could find some inspiration for technology progression by examining the prerequisites in the tech-trees of games like Civilization. Eg, found on google, http://well-of-souls.com/civ/civ5_technologies.html

I'll come back and talk more, because this is a cool topic for sure, but gotta run, class is beginning...

There are several things about technology, in our own history, that influence questions like this. First: Quite a bit of technology gets invented but ignored, then invented again when the time is ripe. (Heron of Alexandria, I think it was, invented a steam engine thousands of years ago, which was treated as a mere curiosity and then forgotten. And another ancient Greek apparently invented calculus, but the manuscript was scraped clean so they could use it for another copy of Aristotle, if I remember correctly.) For something to catch on, it has to be invented at the same time as society is ready for it. Second: A society's presuppositions have a great deal of influence over whether scientific and technical advancement can take place. (The ancient world's view of history as fatalistic and cyclical kept them from trying to improve their lot much; more recently, as I've been reading recently on the Stand to Reason blog, a nearly-idolatrous adherence to Aristotle in the Middle Ages kept them from even investigating what we think of as science, and during that period mathematics and science flourished in the Islamic world, which has fallen into much the same slough as we've escaped from ... and so on.) Third: Because of the need for an invention or innovation to occur when society is ready for it, sometimes the timing is very dependent on Providence (or, some would say, chance). Nuclear power several centuries early isn't all that unreasonable!

In my own work, the culture with which I am primarily concerned has access to our world's history and records, so they could (at least in theory) use any technology they want. Some things they choose not to introduce to avoid the problems we've run into, and some don't get explored until some people from our world (with very different assumptions about what kinds of things anyone could possibly want to use) get dumped in the middle of events.

Well, a large part of it is dependent on so many other things. You can easily get away with it, because there are so many factors involved in technological advancement. If you get into explaining it in detail, though, it could be difficult for the same reason. So many factors.

Government, religion, and wars are some big things that will shape how and how quickly technology develops, for example. Religion will give people the motivation or lack thereof. Government gives them the means and lack thereof, and often war can provide the necessity for some of it. If we weren't being attacked, why would we have created the atom bomb when we did? All that sort of thing has to be taken into account. So it's entirely realistic to slow things down or speed things up, just the "why"s can be complicated.

This is an important point.

For example, I recently read that the late Roman Empire (Emperor Trajan is the name that leaps to mind) was very anti-industrialist, even going to the extreme of destroying the workshops of inventors who created materials or machines that would compete with imperial monopolies or reduce the need for human labor (as the government employed large numbers of workers).

So, with my current country (Ilakiool), and their obsession with humanoid labor, technology wouldn't be as high as say, the Aeloo military outpost?

That's one plausible outcome (all other things being equal ... which they never are ...), but by no means the only one. A culture emphasizing "humanoid" labor could also invent lots of things to multiply that human labor (like, in our own history, the cotton gin, and more recently powered "exoskeletons").