  It is now established that the state proposed by Tao and Thouless for the
fractional quantum Hall effect in 1983, shortly after Laughlin's work, is the
ground state in the so-called Tao-Thouless limit, and that it is adiabatically
connected to the Laughlin state. We review the interesting history of the
Tao-Thouless state, and its generalizations, and discuss its relevance and
shortcomings. In particular, we calculate the exclusion statistics of
quasiparticles in the Tao-Thouless limit and point out a principal difficulty
which prevents calculation of the fractional exchange statistics in this limit.
