By day, Damian Ward operates Macs for a printing company in darkest Buckinghamshire, a county just to the north west of London. He’s been doing this for 15 years or so.

By night, Damian hunts for batches of unwanted, unloved old Macs. He hunts down 512k machines, Classics, SEs and SE30s, and early iMacs. He takes them in — from colleagues, friends, Freecycle, eBay, junk sales, anywhere — and tinkers with them. He has quite an impressive collection.

“You bring them home and you think they’ll be beyond repair, and that you’ll only be able to use them for parts,” he says.

“Then you discover they’re working fine, and then you can’t get rid of them can you? You have to keep them.” That’s right. You have to.

So far, Damian’s got 30 machines in the house. Half of them are up in the attic, neatly arranged on shelves. Four or five of these are networked together. None of them are used for much; when Damian wants to work on a particular machine, he lugs it downstairs to the office. You know, where he keeps the other 15 or so computers. There’s more room down there.

Some of them get used for something. The odd games session, even some fiddling about with Quark Express 2.5. “It reminds me of the old days,” says Damian.

When he actually needs to get real stuff done, he has an Intel iMac, a black MacBook, and an iPhone. At work, he’s using a Mac Pro all day.

“I just like Macs,” he says simply. “I like their quirkiness. They’re so much more appealing than Windows machines, if you know what I mean.”

We know what you mean, Damian. We know exactly what you mean.

Spotted in the 68k Liberation Army Flickr pool. Thanks to Damian for his time, and for the pics.