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Absolutely. And discs as well. I had an x-ray recently and asked them to give me the image so I could take it to a different clinic, and they burned it onto a CD. So I suppose optical media is sort of irreplaceable for medical applications at least.

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Like floppy disks were in Japan for a long time... and fax machines in other countries.

The thing is that sometimes you just need a cheap physical medium you can give away. Sure cloud is an alternative, but it's a bad one, since it costs money to keep online. A CD or a floppy is something you record and forget. And USB sticks are much more expensive and can be a security risk.

oh, how quickly we forget the infamous autorun debacle of the CD-ROM

Autorun ran automatically because it made sense back then since there were no recordable CDs yet. It was assumed that no one would put malware onto a pressed CD, except, apparently, Sony.

Starting with, iirc, XP, Windows started prompting you whether you'd like to run the autorun.

Apparently faxing is the preferred medium of exchange in the medical field.

One would think that some sort of common EDI would have come around by now.

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