New York (CNN) — Elwood Edwards, a backstage graphics and camera operator at local Cleveland television station WKYC whose voice became famous worldwide after recording the email greeting for AOL’s ‘You’ve Got Mail,’ has died, according to his former employer. He was 74 years old.

WKYC said he passed away after an undisclosed “long illness.”

Any old AOL user can recognize his voice. More than 30 years ago, Edwards recorded four iconic lines for America Online, a little-known company at the time.

Edwards said in a 2012 AOL YouTube video that his wife, Karen, worked at Quantum Computer Services, which eventually became AOL. In 1989, he overheard America Online’s former CEO, Steve Case, discussing adding a voice to the upcoming AOL software.

She enlisted her husband to volunteer, and Edwards recorded the sentences on a cassette player in the living room. These four phrases – “Welcome”, “You’ve Got Mail”, “Files complete” and “Goodbye” – would eventually be heard by hundreds of millions of people and become a core part of the AOL experience. AOL and CNN were jointly owned for about 15 years but are no longer related.

“I had no idea what this was going to be, and I don’t think anyone else did either,” Edwards said in a 2019 podcast interview “Silent Giants with Corey Cambridge.” “Suddenly AOL took off… I remember standing in line at CompUSA and seeing (a stack of AOL CDs) and thinking: ‘My voice is on every single one of them and no one has a clue.'”

Edwards worked for years at Cleveland, Ohio television station WKYC, where the station said he was a jack of all trades, from camera operator to graphic designer.

Frank Macek, WKYC’s senior broadcast director, was friends with Edwards for 15 of the 30 years he was at the station. He said Edwards was generous with his knowledge of the broadcast business and was willing to guide colleagues through new systems.

“Every time someone comes to visit WKYC, they introduce themselves and they get to know them,” Macek said. “There was such a relationship between his voice and AOL for so long that he became instantly famous as a result.”

Edwards also appeared on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and uttered different expressions based on viewers’ suggestions.

Edwards was born in New Bern, North Carolina, and graduated from high school in the Tar Heel state, he said in an interview on the “Silent Giants with Corey Cambridge” podcast.

He started working in radio in high school and later became a television stand-in announcer and hosted a radio show.

“I have never enjoyed being in front of the camera as much as I have enjoyed being behind the camera,” Edwards said on the podcast.