I started programming in 1985 and thought I was very likely too late. I was the same age as Chris Espinosa, who was Apple's head of documentation at age 14. At that time it was still not perfectly clear that PCs would be regarded as essential to business. I had no one to talk to about computers and programming. I was in a very rough spot in my life and had to teach myself everything, while not being sure I'd have a job in 5 years.
A decade later in 1996 I started at Microsoft, which virtually all of my peers thought had run its course. They were selling stock like crazy. By the time I left 4 years later the stock had gone up 1300%. Last I checked it's gone up yet another 2500% or so--I kept my 1,000 ESPP shares mostly out of nostalgia and thanks to a company that was so good to me.
I bought a website after the first dot com bust of 2001, monetized it by hiring well, and it provided a very good living for well over two decades after that.
This is an incredible time to start a web-based business because there's a surfeit of free and almost free tools for development all the way to deployment.