Elwood Edwards, the man who 26 years ago recorded AOL’s “You’ve Got Mail” notification, has passed away at the age of 74, his former employer announced.
Edwards, a graphics designer and camera operator at local Cleveland television station WKYC, died Nov. 5 following a “long illness,” the broadcaster said.
AOL was one of the first major web portals and online service providers in the United States. The company began in the 80s as the Control Video Corporation, a dial-up network service for video game consoles, that later became Quantum Computer Services, before dominating the internet market throughout the 90s as America OnLine, commonly known as AOL.
According to Edwards, it all started in 1989, when his wife Karen, who worked for Quantum Computer Services, overheard the company’s CEO Steve Case talking about adding a human voice to the upcoming AOL software, and she suggested her husband could do a recording.
Edwards was given the green light to record some test samples. The four brief messages he recorded on a cassette tape in his living room—“Welcome,” “You’ve Got Mail,” “Files done,” and “Goodbye”—sounded so good that the company management decided they didn’t need another take.
According to WKYC, Edwards was paid $200, unsuspecting that the short phrases would be played back billions of times for the hundreds of millions of AOL users since then.
“Suddenly, AOL took off… I remember standing in line at CompUSA and seeing (stacks of AOL CDs) and thinking, ‘my voice is on every one of those, and nobody has a clue.’”
Edwards spent a great deal of his career working at WKYC, a Cleveland, Ohio television station, where he worked as a “graphics guru, camera operator, and general jack-of-all-trades,” according to the broadcaster.
Edwards was born in New Bern, North Carolina, and began working in radio in high school. He later became a booth announcer for television and also hosted a radio show.
“I didn’t enjoy being on camera as much as I enjoyed being behind the scenes,” he explained on the “Silent Giants with Corey Cambridge” podcast when discussing his career.