Not only do you deserve kudos for finding this; I also found it curious one of the correspondents on that archive had his email "protected", yet a simple reply to gave me an email window with the adress "wyrm@blueriver.net" filled in for me...
There was a Q&A entry explaining the meaning of potation (an anachronistic legal term meaning to convert from one form to another), but it is no longer there.
That sounds remarkably like what portation means in a software context, as already pointed out. So absent independent verification of the above, I suspect the "typo for 'portation'" theory is actually the correct one.
Not that it really matters. We know the intended meaning, and it conveniently doesn't change based on which theory of how it got there you believe.
