Stupid question (OSX)

This seems like a stupid question, but it drives me nuts. When I use the terminal at work (Ubuntu), I can write in a portion of previous command, say the first few letters, then press 'up' and access the history of commands which began with this string.

However, on iTerm or X11 or the usual terminal (which runs bash) on my Mac, this is not available. Why...?

Because you need to configure .bashrc in OSX
The link below will help

http://macfidelity.de/tag/bash_history/