(Update: It’s gone again.)

For a few glorious hours last October, iPhone and iPad owners could turn their devices into fully-functioning DOS emulators with iDOS, a $1 app. It was, of course, too good to be true, and Apple quickly removed the program.

Surprisingly, iDOS is back in the App Store, possibly for good, and now it’s free. The only major concession is the removal of file transfers through iTunes, which allowed users to load and install pretty much anything — even Windows 3.0.

But as TouchArcade points out, you can work around this roadblock by downloading iPhone Explorer on your PC and dropping files into the “/Apps/iDOS/documents” directory, which becomes the C: drive in iDOS. Hooray nostalgia!

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(Update: Word got around, I guess. iDOS is now gone from the App Store. Original post continues below.)

Either I’m dreaming, someone in Cupertino messed up, or Apple has seriously relaxed the rules of what flies in the iOS App Store. For $1, you can now download iDOS, a DOS emulator for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

Touch Arcade broke the news earlier today, and I initially figured it was a fluke, like the accidental approval of a Nintendo emulator last year. But for now, the app is still available, and I just downloaded it directly on my iPhone and from within iTunes. iDos includes two games, Ms. Pac-Man and Dig Dug, plus its own virtual keyboard and keypad instead of the stock iOS inputs. I tried Dig Dug on an iPhone 3GS, and it’s a little slow, but I’m hoping for better results when I try it on the iPad later today.

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In a move that somehow seems simultaneously inevitable and unnecessary, Microsoft has released a line of T-shirts–which, of course, it’s calling Softwear. They feature 1980s-era graphics with the old-school Microsoft logo which nobody has given any thought to in the past 15 years, were designed in collaboration with rapper Common, and show up in stores on December 15th. (No word yet on whether Microsoft will patch ‘em for you if they’re discovered to have any holes.)  In celebration of this milestone for American casualwear, we’ve assembled a slideshow of the shirts.