This is beautiful. I wish I knew this eons ago!

Ok. I’m glad I clicked those. I know it’s his voice. But still worth hearing.

hes got a great voice! thanks for sharing

Ooh. I found the original email from him.

    From: VoicePro@aol.com
    Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2002 22:16:04 -0500
    Subject: Your files :)

    Hi, John.

    Thanks for your order.  Here are your files... and I included a 
    "You've got mail, John" file, too.  Enjoy!!

    El Edwards

So, now I can upload "Use the source, Luke!" (https://soundcloud.com/john-graham-cumming/use-the-source-lu...) and "You've got mail, John!" (https://soundcloud.com/john-graham-cumming/youve-got-mail-jo...).

What a cool piece of internet history. (And awesome that he was a good sport)

JGC, you seem to be one of those people that always has a finger in many little internet trivia things.

I'd be bold to say, almost like a Forrest Gump of the internet.

I just have a high-degree of curiosity and a tendency to email random people and see if they'll respond. And I got on the Internet in 1986 so I've been around a while.

Fun story about that. Back in 1996 Nicholas Negroponte wrote a column in Wired lamenting the fact that laptop batteries didn't show their charge state. This mattered because all of us who travelled a lot carried multiple batteries to switch them in our laptops (some laptops could have two batteries at once allowing hot swapping without a shutdown). See: https://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED4-12.html: "I now carry eight to ten battery packs during long trips. I won't even consider a laptop design that includes unstackable batteries. The fact that most batteries don't indicate their charge state is pathetic."

I emailed Negroponte with my solution: before a trip I'd charge all my batteries up (I think I had five) and I had numbered them by writing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 on them with a sharpie. Then, I'd simply use them in numerical order. He graciously replied something along the lines of "Sometimes the best solution is the simplest".

I miss those days when you could email someone serendipitously and expect a response. Now its all filled with spam and nobody responds to anything

Maybe. I emailed this guy and it went well: https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/cracking-old-zip-file-to-help-o...

RMS would reply to most on topic emails, I think I emailed him just a few years ago and got a reply. And in place of email, some people have had similar success with Twitter. Tim Dodd comes to mind, his Twitter communications with Elon Musk, always on topic and well researched, helped propel his career.

I emailed a suggestion to, and received a response from Steve Jobs in the late-90s. Didn't think a thing about it, changed jobs a time or two, business I was at closed. Yeah.

His voice sounds a bit higher pitched than the famous 90s recordings. I wonder if that's a product of the original recording equipment or format used to store it, or something like that.

The fundamental pitch sounds similar but the tonal quality is different. The infamous "You've Got Mail" is probably lower bit depth and sample rate which lead to crunchier and darker sound qualities respectively. It also sounds like the AOL soundbite was recorded with him very close to a dynamic mic with a healthy dose of proximity effect which would explain the omnipresent low frequency.

The ars article on this suggests it was simply recorded on his personal cassette recorder:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/11/the-voice-of-america...

I saw that too, but also I thought I read he was a broadcast trained professional voice, so he might have had some decent equipment at home.

I was wondering if the format might also be a factor. The comment above talking about sample rates is the direction I was thinking. Also I remember coming across formats other than the ubiquitous 16-bit LPCM, like 8 bit formats or mulaw and alaw, I don't know enough about those to say this is the difference I hear, but am aware that different encodings exist.