The winter of 1968 marked the start of one of the most turbulent periods in modern American history: Antiwar protests in Washington, Johnny Cash's iconic performance in Folsom Prison, and the first roots of the Prague Spring that cemented the former Soviet Union's dominance in Eastern Europe.

It was also the last time IBM's stock price saw a collapse larger than Tuesday's 26% plummet. The historic meltdown wiped nearly $70 billion from Big Blue's market cap and added a new element to the so-called "SaaSpocalypse" selloff that has taken more than 20% from the IGV Expanded Tech-Software Sector exchange-traded fund's sector since last autumn.

Back in 1968, concerns about antitrust investigations drove IBM shares lower. How times have changed: Now markets are questioning whether artificial-intelligence will render software players like IBM obsolete.

Big-ticket stocks don't typically suffer from slumps that require access to newspaper archives to confirm comparisons, but IBM isn't the only blue chip to suffer the kind of massive decline that demands a rethink of a company's entire raison d'être.

What happens next, however, is by no means a done deal.

Meta Platforms, the social media giant and Facebook owner, suffered two IBM-like slumps in 2022. The first, in February, wiped $232 billion from its market value in a single session, with a follow-on slump in October that pushed the stock below $100 a share for the first time in seven years.

Fate stepped in, however, the following month, with the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November, a move which kicked off both a broader market rally and the start of the artificial-intelligence investment boom. Shares of Meta, a key player in both, have risen more than sixfold since then, and trade with a market value of more than $1.7 trillion.

Target Corp. shares, however, haven't been so lucky. The stock shed more than $80 billion in market value in the spring of 2022 -- its biggest share price decline since the Black Monday crash of 1987 -- as profits were hammered by a shifting retail landscape in the postpandemic era.

The stock has yet to reclaim the levels it traded in 2022. The stock was last pegged with a market value of $62.8 billion, around half of what it was at its peak. Its larger rival, Walmart, was last valued at around $900 billion.

UnitedHealth lost more than $120 billion in market value in the spring of last year, when it surprised Wall Street with its first profit miss since 2008 and lowered its outlook for the year based on soaring medical costs.

The stock has yet to fully recover, even with Thursday's solid earnings and share price gains. It remains some 25% south of the all-time high it reached in the autumn of 2024 -- just days before the murder of CEO Brian Thompson in New York.

The fate of IBM over the next year, and indeed into the even longer term, might be just as difficult to parse.

IBM said customers are shifting their IT spending budgets toward chips and servers, and away from IBM's traditional software and server offerings. That theme -- which has been mapped out by the market's biggest players, the so-called hyperscalers, is expected to last well into 2028 and beyond.

Data-center capital spending, in fact, is likely to top $5 trillion by 2030, according to Goldman Sachs estimates, and none of that is likely to find its way into IBM's Armonk, New York, headquarters.

Still, this is a company generating $17 billion in quarterly sales and billions in free cash flow. It boasts an operating margin of around 20% and a balance sheet that carries a single-A rating from the three major credit-rating firms.

It also has a hammerlock on the market's "next big thing": quantum computing. Just last month, IBM unveiled plans to spend $10 billion on the developing technology over the coming years.

Big Blue plans to deliver the world's first "large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer" by 2029, with Bernstein analysts forecasting a total addressable market worth as much as $170 billion by 2040.

But those factors were likely front of mind when the stock hit its all-time high of $329.23 on June 2 with a market value of $309 billion. On Thursday, the stock was trading some $124 billion south of that level.

So, do investors bet on quantum-led gains for the market's oldest tech stock, or bet that software spending -- which the AI boom continues to erode -- might not recover before then?

History in buying the dip on blue-chip stock declines is mixed. And IBM's future is cloudy at best, and storm-sensitive at worst.

"Stocks sell at silly prices from time to time," billionaire investor Warren Buffett once said. "It doesn't take a high I.Q. to figure out that they're cheap, but it does take a temperament that's willing to step up and actually act."

Write to Martin Baccardax at martin.baccardax@barrons.com

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July 16, 2026 12:47 ET (16:47 GMT)

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