New Delhi, Feb. 24 -- A single blog post from Anthropic has led to over $30 billion being wiped off IBM's market value in one session. Why, you may ask? Well, it's all linked to a programming language called COBOL which has been central to IBM's operations for over 60 years. So what exactly is COBOL and what did Anthropic say to stir panic among investors? Let's find out below.

COBOL, which stands for Common Business-Oriented Language, is a programming language created in 1959 which is still widely used for business and financial data processing. The language was created by a consortium called Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL), with the first version coming out in 1960.

The language was meant to serve as a stopgap solution,...