Plenty of business started out of a garage in the 80's and earlier, many of them are well known names today like apple. A lot of video game companies grew from

Plenty of business started out of a garage in the 80's and earlier, many of them are well known names today like apple. A lot of video game companies grew from bedroom coders. Software could be sold through direct mail order. In the 90's a lot of companies bootstrapped themselves (the term was in existence) by building access apps for businesses or building small bits of custom software for large local business. If anything it's probably harder to get started today, your competition is worldwide, not just local and customer expect more than a text based terminal app.