Windows Technology

No in my local store it was definitely XP SP2. Saw it do the complete restart from boot.

If you added all the right options to a base XP Embedded setup (and this was one of the stock configurations MS provided) it would be indistinguishable from normal XP bar a few version number strings. After XP support ended, many people took advantage of the longer embedded support and "upgraded" their normal version to embedded (normally using the point-of-sale product codes) to carry on getting updates. MS also sold extended support to various companies.

Full screen Metro apps weren't the best idea either.

The French Minister of the Interior were using Windows 2000 at their juxtaposed controls in the UK until about 4/5 years back. Then they upgraded.

To XP, then Win 10 last year.

All of their applications are open source, such as LibreOffice and their internal systems are Web apps.

BBC local radio stations were still using BBC Micros till the early 1990s....

as well as using Betamax tapes for recording output!

The BBCs main booking system was on XP until it was replaced a couple of years ago. It was only used by them and would have had to have paid to get it rewritten for a newer OS. They held out for as long as they could but having unsupported XP machines in every region and across the control rooms had to end eventually

First version of Windows I used was 3.11, I think I've used pretty much every edition of Windows since at some point.
We still have some standalone machines running XP where I work for legacy software reasons, and the majority of desktops are Windows 7.

pft. their HR system (PIMS) required a virtual machine of Windows 3.11 to clunk into action. That was used until about 4 years ago at which point it was decommissioned.

Except the giant DAT tape server that backed up PIMS was not decommissioned at the same time, and if you failed to change the tape (which backed up the now unused system) you got an angry phone call from head office...

I remember when I worked the tills during the summer holidays at M&S circa 2006/7, mine needed a reboot as it has crashed and I was amazed to find it ran NT4 and took forever to boot up. The back-office was not much better as they still ran a mix of NT4 and XP (on the newer machines) in the store I worked in. Mind you XP was a pretty reliable workhorse.

All the self scan tills run some form of XP even to this day, have often seen in my local stores when they've got technical problems the 2000/XP style login box, covered up with a till broken notice.

I'm surprised XP is still used in self service tills, would have thought most would have switched to Windows 7 or even Windows 10 for security reasons.

It'll almost certainly be because the software/modules required for the software need updating, or they're not compatible with a newer version of Windows.

Being stuck on old hardware/software bases isn't anything new, when the entire "Y2K Bug" was an actual concern, a lot of banking software/systems and various things were still running on software that was designed in the 1960s. It was probably never designed to still be being used 40 years later but again, costs money to port it over. However the media blew Y2K up as being far more major than it could have been, by saying things like planes will fall out the sky and anything with a "clock" (as in tells the time) will stop working. Except that in a lot of electronics a "clock" is simply something that regulates how quickly/often/regular something happens and is not a measure of time as in ten past seven.

It's also entirely feasible that the drivers for the hardware are not written for modern OS, and the cost for scrapping that hardware or getting custom software written outweighs the benefits of doing so. Can't imagine self service tills are particularly cheap to replace - well, not the full-fat ones anyway with coin acceptors, cashboxes, scales etc.