Quake is just (a probably small (not wanting to dimish it, of course)) part of the history. SGI and the enormous effort to get compliant implementations on many different systems and architectures are what made OpenGL what it eventually became.
Without Quake, OpenGL would have remained an extremely niche thing for professional CAD and modeling software. And Microsoft would have completely owned the 3D gaming API space.
Quake (and Quake 2, and Quake 3, and the many games that licensed those engines) really opened the floodgates in terms of mass market users demanding OpenGL capabilities (or at least a subset of them) from their hardware and drivers.
I'm not sure how to measure this in an objective way, but if the mass market of PC gamers didn't dwarf the professional CAD/modeling market by several orders of magnitude, I will print out my HN posting history and eat it.
Everybody else is this discussion is talking about the PC 3D API space. The place where OpenGL lives. It's right there in the title of the linked article.
Ctrl+F "PC" => zero results found.
OpenGL was most definitely PC-only[1] during those days[2]. So to anybody who understands the subject matter... it's extremely obvious we're talking about PC graphics APIs.
I am sorry you don't know the subject matter or the history, but that is a poor excuse for attempting to "correct" people who do. Very rude.
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[1] "PC" as in "personal computer", not "Windows PC". OpenGL has been supported on Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc.
[2] OpenGL basically is still PC-only, although since Linux supports it, it can run in a lot of places. PS3 and mobile devices had OpenGL ES, a different and more stripped down API)
TMS34010 (1986), Renderman Shading Language(1990), Cell (2005),...