I had a job with MCI (hell that screams old right there) back in the early 90's. They were developing a new project (Perspective, I believe it was called) that would revolutionize the way that billing was done. So instead of shipping a truckload of paper bills to a company like JCPenny, they would just burn the information onto a CD and deliver it. I recall being told that the CD burner they had bought (which was a box the size of a nightstand) was 100k+.

oh and I think the media cost like $50 per burnable cd (or something like that).