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... On Tuesday, Elwood Edwards, the voice behind the online service America Online's iconic "You've got mail" greeting, died at age 74, one day before his 75th birthday, according to Cleveland's WKYC Studios, where he worked for many years. The greeting became a cultural touchstone in the 1990s and early 2000s in the early Internet era; it was heard by hundreds of millions of users when they logged in to the service and new email was waiting for them.

The story of Edwards' famous recording began in 1989 when Steve Case, CEO of Quantum Computer Services (which later became America Online"or AOL for short), wanted to add a human voice to the company's Quantum Link online service. Karen Edwards, who worked as a customer service representative, heard Case discussing the plan and suggested her husband Elwood, a professional broadcaster.

Edwards recorded the famous phrase (and several others) into a cassette recorder in his living room in 1989 and was paid $200 for the service. His voice recordings of "Welcome," "You've got mail," "File's done," and "Goodbye" went on to reach millions of users during AOL's rise to dominance in the 1990s online landscape.

The mail alert phrase was perhaps most notable and popular in the dial-up online era, when users would call local AOL phone numbers with a modem to access the nationwide online network. At the time, AOL was also one of America's largest Internet service providers. ...

Thank-you for your contributions to the burgeoning world of email.

R.I.P. Elwood Hughes Edwards Jr.

@#4 ... Something tells me you still have an AOL dial-up account in use. ...

I've had dial-up access since the late 1970's, accessing email and online message boards.

Back then, the company I worked for even paid for an extra phone line so that I could work from home and not tie up my regular phone line. Access speed was 300bps, moving to 1200bps around 1980. Speeds went up to 19kbps (using the MNP5 protocol) somewhere in the late 1980's.

When DSL became available, I switched from dial-up to DSL. Not sure of the time frame, though. Maybe mid-1990's.

When the cable company started providing ISP service, I switched to that. Recently I had speeds of 800Mbps, but I pared that back to 200Mbps because that is all I needed.

I never was an AOL subscriber.