Historically a number of people started as single small developers with tools like FoxPro, Delphi, and (even earlier) Clipper/dBase. These allowed easy creation

Historically a number of people started as single small developers with tools like FoxPro, Delphi, and (even earlier) Clipper/dBase. These allowed easy creation of some kind of UI. All of these have a database under the hood. The combination of the two allowed a lot of small groups to make quite complicated systems for a single platform. Now there's an expectation for things to be web-based and the entry point feels less obvious than it used to be.