Oldest existing topic: How old is everyone?, created in January 2001, a solid four months after the board's creation. I wasn't around that far back, so I don't know if there was a purge of some sort, or if people were just using PM, or what.
First tool: I'm not sure, but I suspect it was Jenova, Qhimm's own save editor. To quote its description on the
front page, "This was the program that started my programming career." For years, this was the only FF7 save editor we had, and it wasn't perfect, but it was fairly powerful.
First ban: Most of this info did not survive the upgrade from SMF to SMF 2 in May 2006, but my keen detection skills would suggest it was the user
Joey, whose last post was in April 2003. I don't know why he was banned, and it's possible the offending post (or posts) got deleted.