"Accelerated? Why?"

"Cultural and infrastructure reasons, I believe."

"Things got very exciting in my world over the last couple of decades because someone figured out how to make it likely that one's children will be mages. Before that we were really rare."

"Oh, how?"

"You have to eat a lot of seaweed while you're pregnant. It's not a guarantee but it helps a lot."

"Hm. That seems inconvenient for people farther inland."

"It dries all right, but yeah."

"I suppose it's not very heavy, but bulk is still an issue..."

"Yeah. But enough people could get it that now there are lots of mages my age and under."

"True."

"And lots of things have been invented, but mostly magic things or things we make with magic."

"In the absence of widespread magic a great deal of nonmagical devices have been invented. For example--" he walks over to a desk, opens a drawer and pulls out a flat black object that looks like it's made of--glass? Or maybe stone? "This isn't magical at all." And he presses on an indentation on one end of it, that causes the screen to light up. A set of numerals are written across the top, and a picture of tumbled gemstones occupies most of that side. A horizontal bar, parallel to the numbers, reads "slide to unlock" at the bottom.

"...what is it?"

"This particular device is known as a tablet; it's a subset of a kind of device known as computers. Computers do lots of very small math so densely that they can do this with the results," he gestures at the screen. "There are a lot of very tiny channels of metal, and each one can represent either 'one' or 'zero'--if there is currently electricity flowing through the channel, that's 'one,' if not, it's 'zero.' Electricity is tame lightning. Electricity is also used to produce the light, although differently. Showing pictures is hardly the extent of it, though; with this I could if I so desired record a moving image of myself, sound and all, and send it to a correspondent on the other side of the globe."

"...and this isn't even magic."

"It is not."

"Wow!!!"

"And most of the development of it was done this past century."

"...that's pretty fast. Most of it as in - the baseline didn't matter very much?"

"It mattered some. I think some of the inspiration was taken from mechanical looms, and it would have been much harder without relevant metal-refining and glass-working techniques."

"Looms. Wow."

"They had--cards or something? I don't quite recall."

"I don't know what a loom would do with a card but clearly I'm way behind."

"There were holes in them to hold threads or something."

"Huh. Wood can do some stuff with plant fibers but I'm best in Glass so all my practical experience with making fancy objects is like, windowpanes and such."