Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the first people to officially climb Everest in 1953. It seems really weird to me that people have lived in that area for thousands of years and there is no record of anybody ever climbing it before them.
Not particularly. High-altitude mountains are very inhospitable to human life - even people who live in the area do so at lower altitudes. There's simply no reason for people to be up at the altitudes of Everest. Mountaineering for its own sake is a relatively recent thing.
One technology that's really been vital to Everest expeditions is bottled oxygen. It wasn't until 1978 that someone climbed Everest without using any.
That said, there is debate whether an earlier expedition (by George Mallory and Andrew Irvine) in 1924 did have success in reaching the summit. However, both died either on the way up or on the way down from a successful summit. Whether Mallory and Irvine did reach the summit is debated in mountaineering circles.