I vaguely remember that in the early days of the browser, one notion of what hypertext could be used for was a "zoom in" detail for academic essays: if you wanted a brief overview, you'd take the outermost level, and if you wanted to delve, you would click something and more sentences would appear.
I know this sounds trivial and now, but in the mid-1990s it was thought-provoking. Has anyone seen any web fossils like this lying around, ideally still live on the web somewhere?
Jakob Nielsen's 1995 book Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond has a history of desktop and internet hypertext. Maybe what you're talking about is not web browsers but Gopher?
Gopher is another approach to hypertext over the Internet but it uses a less interesting menu-based interaction style. Gopher users basically see a list of available topics, and after selecting one of them, they get a new menu of whatever their selection pointed to. Eventually, a Gopher user will reach a leaf node that actually contains some information.
Or, from looking at some of the other pictures in the book, maybe you're talking about Hyper-G. The relevant page of the book appears from Google Books starting here with pictures on the next 4 pages.