This paper will describe what happened to the community of informal logicians between 1983 and 1987, when they started to interact with communication scholars, rhetoricians and Pragma-Dialecticians. Special attention will be paid to key events, such as the Second International Symposiums on Informal Logic, the founding of AILACT in 1983, the start of journal Informal logic in 1984, and the international conference on argumentation held at Amsterdam in 1986.