It’s also an example of how it’s not so hard to predict how technology will develop (Snow Crash is another good example), but less easy to predict how society will change. In this version of 2026, there’s still only one household earner, people still have fried eggs and bacon for breakfast, coffee is just coffee, and there’s no TV. Also, I spot an error. Dad was apparently mowing the lawn when It Happened, but later, a self-propelled mower does its thing.
Sigh. Yet another fictional-future date that becomes the past. But hey, we made it this far…
I talked a little about this story in my belated book report about The Martian Chronicles that I wrote earlier this year. Bradbury wasn’t really trying to predict the future so much as he was satirizing postwar American society - our impulsiveness and tendency towards destruction, anti-intellectualism, hyper-consumerism, and the way society treats women and minorities. Also, there’s a pretty big continuity error that comes from inserting what had originally been a stand-alone story into a fixup - it’s been over 20 years since nuclear war broke out, but the bomb only seems to have hit Allendale a few days or weeks ago seeing as the family dog is still alive and there’s still fresh bacon in the fridge.
(One other note on that timeline - it’s only 2026 in the original version. When Bradbury revised the novel in the '90s he shifted all the events in the timeline forward 31 years, so if you buy a new copy of the book today, there won’t come soft rains until 2057.)
Aside: Snow Crash was published in 1992, but is set in 2002. I doubt that Stephenson was literally predicting that society would crash within 10 years; again, more of a satire/cautionary tale about certain trends.