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Following on @Anders Melander suggestion you can find here a free implementation of his idea. The library also supports controls on menus and toolbars, is Vcl styles compatible and High-DPI aware. See some of the images here.

That was a looong time ago and I've not done any serious programming in years. Actually I newer participated in a beta due to lack of time and spare hardware (installing a beta on my production PC was just too risky). And your memory is correct, I did start on the old Compuserve BPASCAL forum before Delphi was even an idea in Anders' brain 8-). Those were the days, acoustic couplers to connect via phone line, later 9600 baud modems, Turbo Pascal, later for Windows with OWL... lots of fun. Just a bit depressing that quite a few of the old crew have already passed away...

Of course.

There are many components/libraries available for running processes and capturing their output. But, I got frustrated with their design and functionality, mostly for the following reasons: Fixation with and premature conversion to strings. Processes produce and consume bytes. Blocking reading of process output, resulting to inefficiencies (tight loops with Sleep, or separate threads for reading the output or providing input to the process) Incomplete features and/or over-bloated So, I have made my own pascal-process single unit library. Main features: Asynchronous reading of process output Separate stdout and stderr reading which can optionally be merged Ability to consume output as it is produced or else let it accumulate and read the final result Ability to provide input to the running process before or while the process is running. Ability to terminate the running process. Synchronous and asynchronous execution of processes. Interfaced-based facilitating memory management. MIT licence Usage: You do not need to install the library. Just download or clone the repo and add the source subdirectory to the Library path. Then add PascalProcess to your uses clause. If you just want to get the output of a process you can use the class functions of TPProcess. TPProcess = class(TInterfacedObject, IPProcess) class function Execute(const ACommandLine: string; const ACurrentDir: string = ''): TBytes; overload; class procedure Execute(const ACommandLine: string; const ACurrentDir: string; out Output, ErrOutput: TBytes) overload; end; This is an example: var Output: TBytes; begin Output := TPProcess.Execute('cmd /c echo Hi'); Writeln(TEncoding.ANSI.GetString(Output)); end; For more demanding cases you can use the IPProcess interface. Example: type TUtils = class class procedure OnRead(Sender: TObject; const Bytes: TBytes); end; class procedure TUtils.OnRead(Sender: TObject; const Bytes: TBytes); begin Writeln(TEncoding.ANSI.GetString(Bytes)); end; procedure Test2; // Processes ouput as it gets produced // The main thread terminates the process var Process: IPProcess; begin Process := TPProcess.Create('cmd /c dir c:\ /s'); Process.OnRead := TUtils.OnRead; WriteLn('Press Enter to start the process. Press Enter again to terminate'); ReadLn; Process.Execute; ReadLn; Process.Terminate; end; See here the definition of IPProcess. Limitations: Currently the library is Windows only. The intention is to support other platforms (help wanted).

Okay, I just thought Lazarus version could have got some updates and improvements. TurboPower was an amazing company, they had so much open source components with great docs, and many of them are still actual, >10 years after abandonment!