Yeah, you can sideload pirate ebooks onto a Kindle. There are some restrictions with file formats, most people use Calibre if they run into issues with them. For ebooks I just grab mine from libgen most of the time.
My coworkers were talking today about all the hoops they were going through with streaming to find the content they wanted and navigating the byzantine extra charges to share it with their family. If piracy wasn’t an option I still wouldn’t go through all that, it’s madness how much worse the paid service is to the high seas.
There are companies that still sell new machines of archaic operating systems for this reason. I’d really recommend anyone in the situation of justletmeremember to look into it, all that stuff could be backed up and given redundancies pretty inexpensively considering the risk.
And yeah, it’s really common. There is way more horrifying applications than research that rely on legacy machines. Everyone has heard that nuclear weapons required floppy disks until very recently, but it wasn’t some isolated case. Stuff like that is all over the military despite the insane amount of money it steals.