"The world has since standardised on SQL, and the dreams of an alternate history exists only in the heads of those who had a hand in the early database wars. It was simply a quirk of history that System R was built within IBM, the single most powerful company in the computer industry at the time; it was a quirk that the engineers who built System R came up with a fiddly language interface as an afterthought, and it was a quirk that IBM then took that language and pushed it to become a standard … one that has lasted till today.

Of course, there was a silver lining to the whole saga. Stonebraker had forked the Ingres codebase in 1982 to create his company. Defeated by the bruising database wars of the 80s, he returned to Berkeley in 1985, and started a post-Ingres database project. Naturally, he named that database post-gres — as in, after Ingres.

And thus PostgreSQL was born."

I was trying to figure what you meant. I think I have an inkling now -- let me know if this is correct. Your quibble is with the fact the implication here is that since SQL won, Stonebraker jumped on the SQL bandwagon and created a SQL database, when in fact, he didn't -- he merely created Postgres, which ran on QUEL and didn't have SQL until much later.

I think the author made a stylistic choice to omit that detail to drive home a point, but even so nothing was said that was non-factual.