"EBCDIC is not relevant to your life. We don't have to go that far back in time."

I wish this was the case.  And for 99% of you it might be.  But there's still lots of EBCDIC (and antique COBOL) out in the wild that increasingly has to interact with the real world.  One of the chunks of telephony software I'm responsible for has to interface with an EBCDIC system, requiring some basic translation to UTF-16. (And then eventually has to pass some of this now UTF data back to the EBCDIC system.)  Not exactly difficult until you get to the various numeric encodings and no one can decide if they want Binary-Coded Decimal, Pic9s, pure int, signs, which endianess (if they even know about endianess), et cetera.

EBCDIC wasn't dead in 2003 when Joel wrote this and it certainly (and unfortunately) isn't dead in 2012.