Civ Assist II, a helper-program which runs alongside Civ3 and collects game-data into more user-friendly tables for quick comparisons of e.g. available trades. Works with WinXP to Win8, but may not work reliably on newer Windows versions.
CRp-MapSuite(?) is a similar helper, but works on newer Win-versions as well.
Using the Editor, yes. But Rhye spent a long time balancing this mod, so I wouldn't recommend messing with those values.
On the "Choose Your Tribe" screen, you can click the "Game limits" button, and increase the total turns in-game up to 1000 (from 540 in the base-game -- not sure what the turn-limit is in Rhyes). This won't completely remove the Histographic Victory, but will give you more turns in game before it times out on you.
If tech-pace in your games is routinely as slow as you describe, though, that suggests to me (assuming that you are fully populating the map?) that there is not enough tech-trading and/or too many long wars going on.
How the human player behaves can have a substantial influence on tech-pace, e.g. by hoarding techs vs. tech-brokering, or by signing lots of Alliances which keep the AIs at each others' throats.