Why old Black & White films and TV seem to have better picture resolution than stuff filmed in the 80s and 90s?
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Most black and white stuff was recorded on photographic film, which doesn’t have a fixed resolution (there are practical limits, but they are quite high). It’s just a series of pictures on film. You can scan it at high resolutions.
By the time of the 80s and 90s, most TV (though not film) was recorded on videotape. The thing about tape is that it doesn’t store pictures: instead it stores the waveforms of the radio signals you’d use to transmit the video and audio. This is much cheaper to produce, but in order to get the picture into a radio signal you have to quantize it. Most TV stuff was recorded in 480i (or 576i in PAL regions) at most.
You also have to consider that this stuff looks much worse on modern sets than it did on CRTs. There are several reasons for this, but a lot of it comes down to resolution mismatch: 480i and 576i don’t scale evenly to HD resolutions, and that introduces blur (especially on fhe crappy deinterlacing/upscaling hardware built into modern sets). People in the 80s and 90s didn’t settle for the blurry crap that it looks like today: it wasn’t HD, but it didn’t look bad.
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