How would a bunch of X-Acto blades laying parallel with the canvas be able to cleanly cut it into strips? It seems more likely that the frame contained a pre-cut version that it just rolled out.
Kudos to University of Minnesota (@UMNews) Honors Program. Earlier this year, I asked Prof. Vipin Kumar, my advisor for this work, if he still had a copy, since I had lost my copy. He didn't, but checked with the Honors Program and eventually got a very nice response saying: "Jeff and Prof. Kumar, Here is a pdf copy of the thesis in question. We digitized our physical library about 8-10 years ago and no longer keep hard copies of anything. Hope this is what you are looking for."
Pretty interesting, reading his short bio I learned for the first time about AHPCRC (https://ahpcrc.stanford.edu) of which prof. Kumar was head of for about 7 years, the US military is indeed involved almost everywhere in SV.
I worked in the UofM CSCI department in those days. Vipin's parallel programming research brought in some cool hardware for the time including clusters of RS6000s, IRIX Challenge servers, an IBM SP2 and even a small nCUBE. Also we had a variety of interconnects available including HiPPI, early fibre channel, and even bleeding edge 100 Mbit Ethernet to run MPI and PVM over :-)
I've always wondered what the "secret" in the title refers to. This is pretty common knowledge among people who are from here, is it only secret from the people rushing in to work at FAANG?