Just off the Hume Highway in Western Sydney, Australia's computing history is stacked in dusty roof-high piles — all in urgent need of a good home.

This is the Australian Computer Museum Society (ACMS): caretakers of long-forgotten Olivetti personal computers, unloved Apple floppy drives and even an Interdata 8/32 from the 1970s — a baby blue computing unit with the build of a rugby player.

Their storage space in Villawood is set to be demolished this month, prompting a plea for computer fans to come and take what they can for safekeeping by Friday, August 10.

Two old monitors in the society's Villawood storage space. ( ABC News: Ariel Bogle )

John Geremin, or "Big John", is the society's honorary treasurer and curator.

He said the ACMS just needs an empty warehouse to guarantee the collection's immediate future, but ideally it would be properly housed and displayed.

"There's tape drives, there's disk drives, there's processors. There's basically anything and everything," he said.

Local resident Iain Reed, who has some spare space in a Milperra warehouse, pulled up in a large white removalist truck on Friday with plans to carry off 13 tonnes worth.

"It's all too good to throw out," he said.

"It's our heritage. If this goes, there's 50 years of human history gone."

A wealth of Australian computing history

Mr Geremin himself carries decades of Australia's computing history in his head, contained by an old baseball cap.

Born in 1942, he remembers seeing his first computer at a Sydney University open day in the late 1950s, where he laid eyes on the SILLIAC system, which did "all sorts of magic things".

The hulking machine apparently played digital tunes like Happy Birthday, and so began Mr Geremin's life lived alongside splendid machines.

He was there as computers shrunk from room-sized beasts to sleek, compact units. He did traffic research on an IBM 1620 — once dubbed the CADET (Can't Add Doesn't Even Try) — and later got his hands on a minicomputer, the Hewlett Packard 2100.

John Geremin, or "Big John", is the society's honorary treasurer and curator. ( ABC News: Ariel Bogle )

The ACMS was set up in 1994, but storage has always been a challenge.

The society tried to maintain a representative sample from each decade of computing, but judging by the precarious piles of keyboards, old-fashioned calculators and oddities in the Villawood storage space, they've never said no to people's old units.

"The problem has been of course that the word got out, and we've had thousands and thousands of donations," Mr Geremin said.

"There's an IBM 1401 system outside, that is probably the only one left in Australia, and it's six-foot-long, three-foot-wide, five-foot-high, 800 kilos."

In another room is an Interdata 8/32 that calculated the national debt in the 1970s, he guessed. Its mode of storage? Cassette tapes.

The society has a large collection of computing oddities. ( ABC News: Ariel Bogle )

Computers in need of a good home

Much of the society's Apple collection has already found a home, Mr Geremin said, but there's plenty left — especially if you count the thousands of computer manuals the society has stored in milk crates.

"I did a rough guess at one stage, and said that we probably had in excess of 50,000 artefacts," he added.

"It could be 200,000 artefacts if you count every document that we've got."

A box full of old programming manuals. ( ABC News: Ariel Bogle )

George Murdocca of Turramurra was also taking a few pieces home — half a car boot full, he estimated.

He runs a technology training school called LinuxDojo and hopes to make a small display of items for his students.

For now, Mr Murdocca planned to take items from his own computing history.

"My history started in the early 1980s, so anything from that sort of era … It was the dawn of the desktop back then," he said.

"I just sort of want to see what's around, feast my eyeballs a little bit."

Will the society keep collecting? Mr Geremin admitted he doesn't thrill to 2018's technology (although he has an iPhone) — it's too same-same; too hostile to tinkering.

Another computer system in the society's collection. ( ABC News: Ariel Bogle )

"In in the early days, if you wanted to change the way that the computer looked and felt, you could have a go at it," he explained.

"Nowadays you don't do that sort of thing, you just get a few apps off the web and do what somebody else's designed it to do.

"Some of the things that are out there in 'never-never land' — on the way past the moon — are simple 1960s technology and they are still doing their job."

Mr Murdocca said he considers computers to be an extension of ourselves and deserving of a good home.

"[They] allow us to get on with more human things, like being creative," he added.

"And here is a stash of its very, very humble roots."

The ACMS is located at 888 Woodville Road, Villawood and will be open weekdays 10am to 10pm until August 10.