Hacker News Reader

probably nothing. But to get to market when your competitor has 48 years on you and has the ability to ramp up production extremely quickly kind of takes the wind out of your sails if you know what I mean.

Trade secrets most likely. It would be cloned eventually, but Corning would have a lock on the market while other companies did their R&D.

"...Corning dug out Chemcor from its database, tweaked it for manufacturing in LCD tanks, and renamed it Gorilla."

My guess is that "tweaking" is covered by new patents, although anyone should be able to produce the original Chemcor now.

Exactly. In particular, it sounds like they've revamped the manufacturing process a bit to take advantage of modern techniques. This new process will probably be the new patent, rather than the glass formula.