How many information bits are included in the ISO-8859 extension to the ASCII code?

The original ASCII standard is a 7-bit code, which provides 128 possible character combinations. This is sufficient for the basic English alphabet, numbers, and essential control codes. However, it falls short when dealing with accented letters and special symbols used in other languages. To solve this, the ISO-8859 extension was created, which utilizes an 8th bit. This additional bit doubles the number of available characters from 128 to 256, allowing for the inclusion of many international characters and special symbols while maintaining backward compatibility with the original 7-bit ASCII.