From what I can find, an IBM S/390 from the early 1990s could have up to 6 processors and 6 vector coprocessors, up to 9GB of internal storage, and up to 256 fiber-optic links running at 10MB/s (for an total bandwidth of a Thunderbolt port plus a USB 2.0 port).

I don't really know how fast the CPU and RAM were in the IBM mainframe, but I'd suspect the Air's clock speeds are high enough to make up for only having two processors, and the Air's SSD would make it much faster for data sets that don't fit in RAM.

And as for the reliability advantage a mainframe is supposed to have: you could buy several MBAs per month to act as hot-spares for the price of renting the mainframe, and the MBA has a UPS built-in.

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.