Busa began the project in 1946. In 1949,
IBM agreed to sponsor the project until its completion. They assigned Paul Tasman, an executive at the company, to work with Busa. Busa selected 179 texts centering around
Thomas Aquinas that would be put into a form that was
machine-readable. 118 of the works were written by Aquinas, and the remaining 61 items were either at one point mis-attributed to him or an attempt to complete an unfinished work begun by Aquinas. A significant part of the project was the
data entry, which was meticulously carried out by a team of female keypunch operators. Their dedication and precision were instrumental in the success of the project. This work of
punching the text was made between 1950 and 1966. They worked in
Gallarate, Italy, and the project peaked in size in 1962 with 70 workers. After the punching was complete, the data was
lemmatised in a semi-automatic process. The seven completely reprinting the source texts were sold separately. The first volume was published in 1974, and publication was completed in 1980. The project used a total of of tape and it took an estimated 10,000 hours of computer work and 1 million hours of human work to complete. The
Index was released on
CD-ROM in 1992 and a website was launched in 2005. == Reception, impact, and legacy ==