They had an advantage because the movie is mostly about social engineering (which requires acting), and less about actual hacking (computer screens and such which are less exciting to watch on a silver screen).
The pandering comment is funny to me though, because every single Robert Redford character has the same humblesmug, morally superior talk-down-while-encouraging-his-students "cool professor" vibe to me.
The other factor is that the central plot element (not really a spoiler here) involves a system for finding prime factors of large numbers which, 20 years later, would still be ground-breaking technology and would almost certainly have several 3 letter agencies chasing after you.
I studied computer science at the University of Washington in the mid 90s. One of my professors there would tell a story about how Adleman was notorious for answering email days or weeks later, but one time he sent him an email asking a question about the movie and got a response five minutes later.
There's a decidedly cheesy B movie call The Travelling Salesman about a crew of computer scientists who prove P=NP and sit around a conference table trying to decide what to do with the proof. It's fairly accurate without ever actually trying to posit what the proof looks like.
Given our current understanding of mathematics and physics, it is much more plausible that a mathematician (or small team) could achieve a breakthrough advance in prime factorization than that an inventor (or small team) could achieve time travel or an FTL drive. Plausibility is not essential in speculative fiction, but it improves the sense of being grounded, and tends to make ideas age better.
There's a Korean movie from a few years back called The Host. They have an all-time great hacking scene. Guy calls his friend who works for the phone company to get him in the office then they scour the desks in the evening for anyone who wrote their password on a post-it.
The pandering comment is funny to me though, because every single Robert Redford character has the same humblesmug, morally superior talk-down-while-encouraging-his-students "cool professor" vibe to me.