Aside from the higher quality of film over digital, what makes old photographs awesome is that it never even occurred to the subjects that thousands or potentially millions of people might be looking at them, so they didn't act accordingly, allowing you to get a good glimpse of what they were experiencing. This is why film photography is so heavily nostalgia-inducing even for people who weren't around when it was popular. It reminds them of when they were kids, when they still knew how to have a good time without the pressure to show it.