TRS-80, AII and the PET came later.
You were right on the peripherals.
Instead of a serial port, I'd set a TV output with a keyboard as an input, and the Altair would get far more sales.
Teletype and all, the Altair looked and worked like an cut-down entry-level version of the minis that were popular in engineering and science.
Not as powerful as a PDP-8, but less than a tenth of the price.
It was the perfect aspirational project for the electronics hobbyist community of the time.
The fact that you could barely do anything with it wasn't the point. It was a real computer you could set up at home and use without time restrictions or hourly billing.
The S-100 bus market turned into a preview of the PC market. S-100 systems soon sprouted real terminals, floppy drives, and workable memory, and began to appear in the offices of accountants and other non-tech professionals.
The IBM PC probably wouldn't have happened without it. It normalised relatively affordable computing, and the idea of a third party market of expansion cards on a standard bus.
