The thought that struck me was that it was lucky it wasn't someone's startup project, as Corning had the finances to sit on it for 50 years until it found a market use...
Realistically there are issues of course, but that's the theory.
(This is actually one of my core reasons to be against software patents; even if they otherwise worked as designed, in practice a lot of software patents are ten pages of legalese, half or more dedicated to simply enumerating the presence of a computer in the invention and various combinations of "on a network" and "with a disk drive" etc, and in the end the patent document is usually more of a spec then an implementation. If we really carried through on the logic of software patents, a software patent ought to require a software implementation in clear source code that is proved to implement the desired algorithm within a reference environment, and the source code should itself have no copyright protection. Combine that with a shorter term and I'd at least object much less, though I ultimately do agree in abolition in this domain; trade secrets and copyright are adequate to the task, if not already overkill.)
Somewhat more directly on topic, I bet 1960s and 1970s material science patents probably hold a few more things that are useful today that weren't useful then.
The "limited monopoly" is part of a social contract and understanding the whole contract is important.