I interned at a large-ish retail company in the US and we had an IBM mainframe that hosted the core DB2 server. I remember when I first learned of EBCDIC becaus

I interned at a large-ish retail company in the US and we had an IBM mainframe that hosted the core DB2 server. I remember when I first learned of EBCDIC because of that IBM machine and I was blown away. Never had I worked with a character encoding that wasn't at least ASCII compatible. ASCII's table layout had some real benefits to it, like being able to flip the fifth (?) bit to change case of characters. Did the EBCDIC layout have any serious benefits? I have to assume there are but my quick web search didn't come up with anything.