Additionally, since you are going to 20th level and all spell casters are capable of making permanent magic items by their mid-teens, it was also possible for a character who did manage to lose the item lottery to acquire them through their friends and associates.
It's a lot harder than just making an item, actually.
I know this is a response to a pretty early comment, but I just feel obliged to point out that in 1e, it was very expensive and time-consuming to make magic items, and in addition, you risked Constitution loss for permanent items. Not only that, not all high-level casters could enchant items; a magic-user needed the right spells (and back in those days, you got very few spells as you advanced, so it was by no means a sure thing that you'd have
Enchant an Item and
Permanency).
EDIT: My 1e books are at my girlfriend's house or I'd look up time and cost, but I think it's days to weeks to craft an item, and generally pretty expensive to boot.
Anyway, on another subject:
The author wanted to find out if he could grab a module and run it without writing up a conversion document. (Something I've been doing for Goodman Games modules in Pathfinder for a while).
Short answer: probably not.
Longer answer: See post on why the math doesn't align well.
Well, I'm not so sure, given either:
A. A willingness to quickly swap in the 5e stat blocks of monsters; or
B. A simply, easy-to-remember numeric formula for monsters-by-level like 4e had.
The same argument seems to imply you can't just pick up a, for instance, Basic D&D module and run it off the cuff for a later edition, but I've done just that with B4: The Lost City, in both 3e and 4e. Thanks to 4e's easy monster formula, I had no trouble winging appropriate stats for monsters not in the 4e books (oil beetles, freaky hallucinating cultists, etc).
I ran several other modules the same way in 4e, including Box of Flumph (a 3e adventure) and little bits swiped from other modules. I would say that 4e 'changes the math' more than any other version of D&D from Basic, so it's fair to compare and say, "I could do it then; if 5e works well, it should be easy enough to do it in a couple of months."