Time Machine's past backups

Question

I feel I'm missing something with Time Machine. I did the initial backup and have had successful backups every hour since, for a few days now, using Time Machine. I, however, click on Time Machine to "play" around with the feature, there isn't any past backups. I thought I could go back in time to "see" how my computer looked.
It just shows the current backup in the window, nothing in the past. Am I missing a step?

Answer 1

Everyone really helped out with this. I finally got it.
I made sure my external TM name, named Macbook in my case, matched up with my computer name, name also Macbook in my case. There can't be any apostrophe, so get rid of the default name. One problem was the temp mountable backup file (while backing up) was still looking for the old backups to top off. Meaning the temp name was the old computer name.
This is what I did: I didn't do any partitioning, but I did delete the actual backup file from my External. Basically started over with a blank External. I then re-backed up, which took hours b/c about 25 gb, and then, once complete, forced another backup (small mb change). I then launched TM and there were the past backups and it has been backing up fine since with multiple past views in the TM window.
Thanks again everyone.