He may be the biggest celebrity you've never heard of - even though, if you use America Online, you've probably heard him thousands of times. More than 27 million times a day (which comes to more than 18,000 times a minute), AOL subscribers hear a familiar greeting when they log on: "Welcome!" And almost as often, they hear another message: "You've got mail!" Elwood Edwards is the man behind those messages - the voice of a generation raised on email, Web surfing, and real-time chat.

"Some people call this my Andy Warhol time," jokes Edwards, 48, a self-proclaimed "clown," who doesn't look the part of cyber-icon. "But this has been going on for more than 15 minutes." In fact, it's been going on for nearly a decade. Back in 1989, Edwards's wife, Karen, was working in customer service for a little-known outfit in Vienna, Virginia called Quantum Computer Services. Quantum had an online service called Q-Link. Karen overheard the company's CEO, a young guy by the name of Steve Case, describe how he wanted to add a voice to its user interface. Her advice: "I said, 'Hey, you ought to try Elwood.'"

And why not? Her husband had spent his entire career in local radio and TV. (He recently left his post as general manager at KVVV-TV, in Houston, to return to Ohio.) "I'd been a director and a producer," Edwards says. "If I had a commercial or a promo that I wanted to do, I was able to write copy for it, run to the booth, cut it, and then come back and put it together."

Edwards agreed to record four simple phrases on a run-of-the-mill cassette player: "Welcome!"; "File's done"; "Goodbye"; and, of course, "You've got mail!" The rest, as they say, is history. Quantum changed its name to AOL; Edwards's voice debuted on AOL 1.0 in October 1989; millions of people signed up - and before long, his voice had become The Voice.

What's the secret of his success? He's not sure - although he thinks it has something to do with the strange relationship between people and machines. "People like to give a computer its own persona," he says. "They want it to sound human - which I think has been one of the endearing features of America Online. Despite all of the changes that the software has gone through, my voice has been a consistent part of it."

Indeed, "You've Got Mail!" has become such a touchstone of the times that Warner Bros. plans to release a movie by that name in December. The film, which features Sleepless in Seattle costars Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, is about two people who fall in love over the Internet. There's something delightfully apt about that story line: Karen and Elwood, longtime cyber-enthusiasts, met in a Q-Link chat room in 1987; and before their actual wedding, they exchanged vows in a "virtual wedding."

Elwood Edwards is no Tom Hanks - yet - but he's got a growing fan club. Karen, in particular, seems to relish her husband's prominence. "A lady from our bowling league wanted an autographed picture," she reports. "She said that one of her relatives was madly in love with his voice." Karen also likes to poke around online chat rooms, where her husband's voice occasionally becomes a topic of conversation: "Some woman will say, 'Oh, I love that voice.' Or she'll talk about 'the little man in my computer.' I'll pop up and say, 'Well, that little man is six foot six.'"