It's easy to forget that 1Gbit/second an insane amount of text / numberic data and 1990 was a LONG time ago. Just concider that the extimated monthly transfter acroos internet backbones in December 1990 was 1TB. That 1GBit lan cable was 100's of times faster than all of the internet backbones in 1990.
So while, Mainframe software is vary efficent the hardware still sucked compared to modern systems. Just think a 1GBit/second Fible Channel did not show up until 1997 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibre_Channel.
PS: The #5 super computer in June 1993 had 4 cores Processor NEC 400 MHz (6.4 GFlops). http://www.top500.org/system/377 A 999$ mackbook air uses a 1.6GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor that would crush it in large part due to that 3 MB L3 cache but also due to being able to do far more in of those cycles.
An interesting aspect is how much more slowely memory sizes have caught up. Today's laptops can crush a 90s supercomputer in GFlops, but are just now catching up to a mid-1990s Cray in main memory (4GB). I remember being fairly befuddled when I started college in 2000, and my CS dept's UltraSPARC servers were slower than my Pentium III in CPU, but had memory measured in a unit that I had only heard of being used for hard drive space.
A fair comparison though would have to be a modern Cray-class supercomputery thing to that Cray though. That's going to have more than 4GB of RAM; modern Cray equivalents open the bid at petabytes of RAM.
Oh, I agree modern supercomputers beat 1995-era ones on all axes; it's mostly the different rates at which consumer-class computers catch up that are interesting. A modern MacBook Pro wipes the floor, CPU-wise, with a 1995 Cray, but only just matches it RAM-wise. So comparisons like "today's [consumer thing] is as good as [year's] [enterprise thing]" depend heavily on whether you're comparing them on CPU or RAM.
So while, Mainframe software is vary efficent the hardware still sucked compared to modern systems. Just think a 1GBit/second Fible Channel did not show up until 1997 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibre_Channel.
PS: The #5 super computer in June 1993 had 4 cores Processor NEC 400 MHz (6.4 GFlops). http://www.top500.org/system/377 A 999$ mackbook air uses a 1.6GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor that would crush it in large part due to that 3 MB L3 cache but also due to being able to do far more in of those cycles.