My first computer was an eight-bit system running the CP/M operating system on an Intel 8080 processor, in about 1980. The system was some $900. I bought a Whitesmiths C compiler for it for about $300, and it came with the Wordstar text editor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitesmiths

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar

That’s reminiscent of the Prosciutto e Melone that my Italian wife has taught me to enjoy!

From reading the text, I speculate that Franklin was alluding to the preexisting saying as well – alluding to the cat in the dark as an accepted axiom.

That seems to illustrate the point that LadyLikesSpiders was making – quite nicely.