Here is a recommendation for a website to visit often if you are interested in history, photography and black and white in particular:
Shorpy. On this site they continuously make hi-res scans of very, very old photographs. Most of them taken at the turn of the last century. So we are talking about images almost 100 years in age!
Here is what I found astonishing:

• apparently these old shoeboxes with coatless glass lenses in front made damn good and sharp pictures.
• some of these images have an immens feel of depth in them... and remember that these ppl did not have photoshop to play with!
• look at the following image for instance... sharp, good contrast etc. AND it dates back to 1921. Think someone will be able to read our DVD within a 100 years? I consider myself lucky if it’s even readable in 5!

I decided to upgrade my Mac hardware, maybe “upgrade” is a small understatement... from a Dual G5 1,8Ghz with 4GB of RAM I went to a new Intel Xeon 8 core with 12GB of RAM and new superfast motherboard architecture.
The exterior looks the same but boy, does this make a difference or what? Photoshop takes about 1 sec to load [including the filters], finally I can run Aperture the way it should thanks to the GeForce 8800FX I ordered in.
This is one sweet baby, here are some pics:

Apple really makes state of the art equipment, of which the inside of this machine is more than enough proof. It reminds me of a showroom SMEG kitchen appliance . On the top you can see 4 very handy SATAII HDD bays and at the bottom there are 2 slide in cards holding the RAM sockets. There still room to go to 32GB’s of RAM... I’ll reserve that for when Photoshop finally goes 64bit [CS4, CS5??] and will be able to address more than the 3,7 it can today.